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ALEXANDER

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ALEXANDER GOLDSTEIN

SEMINARY ADDRESSES

AND OTHER PAPERS

S. SCHECHTER. M. A., LITT. D.

SEMINARY ADDRESSES

AND OTHER PAPERS

BY

S. SCHECHTER, M. A., LITT. D.

PRESIDENT OF THE JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
OF AMERICA

CINCINNATI

ARK PUBLISHING CO.
1915

&

*w

*

• *.'

COPYRIGHT, 1915,

BY
ARK PUBLISHING CO.

TO

DOCTOR CYRUS ADLER

PRESIDENT OF THE DROPSIE COLLEGE
COLLEAGUE AND FRIEND

773204

PREFACE.

The following pages, representing a selection of
Papers and Addresses delivered on various occasions,
were intended to appear in the form of a volume some
three years ago in commemoration of the Tenth
Anniversary of the re-organization of the Jewish
Theological Seminary of America. Illness and other
untoward circumstances prevented me from giving
my attention to their publication until lately. But
it is this delay which made it possible to include the
last five papers.

These papers lay no claim to the attainments of
rhetoric, which are unfortunately beyond my powers,
nor will the reader find in them any indulgence in
abstruse learning, which, even if it were within my
reach, would be out of place in popular Addresses
like these. The references to Rabbinic literature
were mostly omitted for the same reason. All 1
endeavored to do was to express my thoughts in plain
and direct language, in which I hope I did not entirely
fail.

Generally speaking, the burden of these Addresses,
mostly delivered on Commencement and other fete
days of the Seminary, may be described as a plea
for traditional Judaism, which it is the mission
of the Seminary to teach and preach in this country.

PREFACE

They protest against the "shock- tactics" of Higher
Bible criticism; they plead for a better appreciation
of Israel's past and a closer connection between this
past and the present and the future; they demand a
more thorough study of Jewish thought and Jewish
life as deposited in our great literature; they insist
on the development of Jewish science which would en-
able us to compete with other institutions of higher
learning; they also advocate a deeper devotion to the
laws distinctly characteristic of the Jewish conception
of holiness, leading to a more strict observance of
the precepts of the Torah, and endeavor to make us
sensible of the danger of incessant innovations which
must in the end touch the very vital organism of
Judaism.

At the same time, however, these Addresses
often revert to the desirability of adopting in our
studies all the methods which distinguish modern
research from the mere erudition of olden times.
They also set forth the necessity of the future Rabbi's
receiving a proper training in secular subjects, as
guaranteed by the degree of B. A. obtained in some
College of standing, before wholly devoting himself
to Jewish learning. The greater part of a rather
lengthy lecture is devoted to proving that not only
was the application of scientific methods to Jewish
studies not incompatible with the spirit of con-
servative Judaism, but that it was largely con-

PREFACE ix

servative Jews, or at least, men indifferent to Reform
tendencies, who availed themselves of the scien-
tific method and became subsequently the most
prominent representatives of the scientific move-
ment, both by their zeal and their productions.

These Addresses being mostly directed to young
men at the solemn hour of their leaving the Institu-
tion to engage in the sacred calling of Rabbi, neces-
sarily contain admonitions with regard to the special
virtues expected from the spiritual leaders in Israel,
such as humility, meekness, peacefulness and consider-
ateness. There is nothing new in these admonitions.
They have been repeated often enough, but this
very frequency shows the danger to which the "men
higher up" were exposed at all times; and the danger
has certainly not passed away in our time, when
those smitten with the disease of sensationalism find
ready response in a press prepared to satisfy their
vanity with all the means for publicity at its command.

Sometimes opportunity was taken in these Ad-
dresses to appeal rather to the community at large
than to our graduates. As an instance, it will suffice
to mention the graduation speech, headed: "The
Problem of Religious Education," in which the
crying need for a religious education, only accessible
to the few, and even to these, in a very perfunctory
and unmethodical manner, was emphatically pointed
out. I may say that it is one of the merits of the

x PREFACE

Seminary, to have been among the first public
bodies which tried to grapple with this problem and
it is highly gratifying to me to see that the com-
munity did not remain quite indifferent to our appeal,
so that a regular religious educational movement
has been inaugurated almost all over the country.
It has not a> yet worked miracles, but has already
effected some improvement in the methods of teach-
ing Hebrew, and will no doubt, in the course of
time, make progress in the direction of religious
instruction, so that the danger of a Godless posterity
shall be averted. .

As indicated above, the papers constituting this
volume are an expression of the conservative posi-
tion occupied by the Seminary. This conservative
spirit, I need hardly say, permeates the whole Insti-
tution. It is taught by the Professors in the class-
room; it is expounded in the pulpit by the majority
of our alumni; and is propagated by its friends both
in writing and by word of mouth on every occasion.

Not quite falling within the scope of this volume,
are the three papers to be named presently, treating
with subjects having little or no connection with the
Seminary or its policy. The first of these is the
lecture delivered on Abraham Lincoln's Centennial,
forming a study in the spiritual make-up of the great
President, little discussed before. How my views
will be accepted by Lincoln specialists is a question,

PREFACE xi

but whatever the answer, it is hardly necessary to
remark that my conception of Lincoln's character
is not an outcome of the teaching of the Seminary
or its religious tendency. The second, is the paper
entitled, "Rebellion Against Being a Problem,"
delivered more than ten years ago, containing political
views with reference to certain events in past history,
which are possibly not shared by my colleagues of
the Faculty or by the friends of the Seminary at
large. I still belong to that older world which ac-
cepted certain humanitarian principles handed down
to us from the French Revolution as God-given
truths, and which still looks upon the "Declaration
of Independence," based on the same principles, as
a sacred document in spite of all its "glittering gener-
alities." These "glittering generalities" have built
up the new world, while the so-called "eternal verities"
or "realities" are destroying the old world. "And
be it indeed that I have erred, my error remaineth
with myself," and nobody else shall be made respon-
sible for it.

The third paper is the one headed: "Zionism,
A Statement," published in December, 1906, in which
I explain the reasons for my allegiance to Zionism.
But I should like it to be distinctly understood that
this allegiance cannot be predicated of the Institution
over which I have the honor to preside, and which
has never committed itself to the Movement, leaving

xii PREFACE

this to the individual inclination of the students and
Faculty, composed of Zionists, anti-Zionists, and
indifferentists. Speaking for myself, Zionism was,
and still is, the most cherished dream I was worthy
of having. It was beautiful to behold the rise of this
mighty bulwark against the incessantly assailing
forces of assimilation, which became the more dan-
gerous, as we have now among us a party permeated
by Christianizing tendencies, the prominent leaders
of which are even clamoring for a recognition of Paul,
the apostle to the heathen — not to the Jews. These
tendencies, which it must be said in justice, would
have been strenuously opposed by the founders of
the Reform school, are now thrust upon us on every
occasion, and Heaven knows where they might have
landed us, but for the Zionist Movement which again
brought forth the national aspect as a factor in Jewish
thought.

But this dream is not without its nightmares.
For in their struggle to revive the National Senti-
ment, some of the Zionist spokesmen calling them-
selves by preference Nationalists, manifested such a
strong tendency to detach the movement from all
religion as can only end in spiritual disaster. There
is such a thing as the assimilation of Judaism even
as there is such a thing as the assimilation of the
Jew, and the former is bound to happen when re-
ligion is looked upon as a negligible quantity. When

PREFACE xiii

Judaism is once assimilated the Jew will surely
follow in its wake, and Jew and Judaism will perish
together. All this is a consequence of preaching an
aspect of Nationalism more in harmony with Roman
and similar modern models than with Jewish ideas and
ideals. However, nightmares are fleeting and evanes-
cent— the vision as a whole still remains glorious.
The aberrations will, let us hope, be swept away
quickly enough as soon as their destructive nature is
realized by the majority of the Zionists whose
central ideas should and will remain, God and His
people, Israel.

Of a personal nature are the few obituaries re-
produced here. They form a tribute to the memory
of friends of which the American Jewish public, I
am sure, has sufficient knowledge to honor their names.

In conclusion, I should only like to remark,
that when reading these proofs it gave me special
satisfaction to see that the conciliatory note is not
absent from this volume. Standing as the Seminary
does for the healthy development of traditional
Judaism in the midst of many movements and
vagaries none of which are without excesses, and
against which we are constantly struggling, it
was not possible that the controversial feature
should be entirely eliminated from the volume.
Yet it will be found that the ultimate goal at which
we are aiming is union and peace in American Israel.

xiv PREFACE

The union of which I am thinking is not one of mere
organization. Organization is useful in the way of
an auxiliary, but its saving virtues cannot be always
relied upon. Whatever its effects may be for good,
they are more than counterbalanced by its tendency
towards materialization, resulting as history teaches
in the de-secration, if not profanation of things holy.
The union we are in need of, is one on principle and
the recognition of vital facts, decisive in our past and
indispensable for our safety in the future, by which
alone Israel can hope for a "name and remainder upon
the earth." • Such a recognition, however, can only be
brought about by a thorough knowledge of our great
literature, in which alone the Jewish soul found shelter
and expression for untold generations, joined to broad
sympathy and loving understanding for all the aspir-
ations and cravings and longings and hopes recorded
in this very literature. This is the mission of colleges
and Jewish learned societies. The longer I live in this
country, the more I am convinced that it is only such
a thorough and hearty union which will enable us to
deal with the great problems, spiritual and otherwise,
confronting us. Parties come and parties go, but the
word of our God shall stand forever. And so shall
Israel.

S. SCHECHTER.

CONTENTS.

The Emancipation of Jewish Science . . 1

The Charter of the Seminary .... 9

Higher Criticism — Higher Anti-Semitism . . .35

The Seminary as a Witness . . . . . 41

Spiritual Honeymoons . . . . . .53

Rebellion Against Being A Problem ... 65

The Reconciliation of Israel . . . . .73

Altar Building in America ..... 81

Zionism: A Statement . . . . . .91

The Problem of Religious Education . . . 105

Moritz Steinschneider . . . . . .119

Rabbi as a Personal Example . . . . 125

Lector Meir Friedmann ...... 135

Abraham Lincoln ...... 145

Benno Badt 169

The Beginnings of Jewish Wissenschaft . . . 173

The Test the Rabbi Should Apply . . . .195

The Beth Hamidrash 207

Humility and Self-Sacrifice as the Qualifications of

the Rabbi . . . ' . . . .217

The Assistance of the Public . . . .229

His Majesty's Opposition ..... 239

"Lovingkindness and Truth" .... 245

THE EMANCIPATION OF JEWISH SCIENCE.*

SPEAKING is not my metier. I was brought up in
an atmosphere of silence, where people listen,
obey and occasionally also command. I am not
particularly proud of my incapability, as I never
boast of my shortcomings. I am only stating a sad
fact. Another fact is, that I came originally from
a place in which eating had little of the nature of a
sacrament and was never accompanied by solemn
speeches. Either the dinner was a success, and we
gave thanks with sighs of satisfaction for the good
things we received, or it was a failure, and we held
our peace in stoic resignation.

However, there is an old proverb, "If you come
to a place, follow its customs," and I mean to follow
them. In fact, except such trifling things as ice water
and certain articles of a rather theological nature
which I cannot well digest, there is no country whose
manners and customs, whose institutions and con-
ceptions of right and wrong, I should more like to
adopt and make my own than those of this great and
free Republic. It was the dream of my childhood
when I learned, through the Sepher Haberith and the
letters of Hag Vidaver in the Hebrew weekly, Hama-
gid, of the existence of a continent on which, accord-
ing to my simple conceptions, people should stand
on their heads, and who yet somehow managed to
walk erect and free and even move quicker and with
*Address delivered at the Judaean Banquet, May 29, 1902.

SEMI NAR Y A DDRESSES

a surer pace than we, with all our drill of thousands
of years. It became dearer to me when such books
as the Stories of the Pilgrim Fathers and the Lives
of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln became ac-
cessible to me, whilst in later life American history
and literature became a passion with me, so that I
gave many an hour to your country which was due
to Palestine, Egypt and Babylonia. I am thus pre-
pared to adapt myself also to the institution of after-
dinner speeches. In accordance with the good old
Jewish custom, I will only, in the presence of this
distinguished gathering, premise my address with
the words: "With your permission, my superiors in
wisdom and my masters in eloquence."

Now I have spoken of your great and free country.
It will, therefore, not be out of place if I say that it
rests with you to undertake the emancipation of
which Zunz dreamed and wrote about eighty years
ago. The emancipation of the Jews, he wrote, will
never be complete until Jewish science is emanci-
pated. That is to say, till Jewish learning and
Jewish scholarship and the knowledge of its literature
have become recognized factors in the march of human
intellect; till Jewish science should occupy a position
among other sciences worthy of its long history and
its influence upon mankind, holding an independent
place, resting on its own merits, free from all patronage
of malicious theologians and sulky divines. This was
a wish expressed, as I have said, some eighty years
ago. But matters have improved very little since
then. If possible, they have grown worse. For
dependent as the oM Jew was in his relations to the
outer world, he never allowed earthly powers to

EMANCIPATION OF JEWISH SCIENCE 3

encroach upon his spiritual domain, which made
his real life. He would lend and borrow and buy the
old clothes of the poritz (the lord of the estate), but
when it came to his religion he was every inch a king.
He had no mortgage on his liturgy; it was entirely
his own, and he watched over his sacred literature
with the tenderness and the jealousy of a lover. The
reverse of the picture is not pleasant to dwell upon.
I always have the impression, when I come to a
synagogue or enter the study of a Jewish scholar,
that we are something of spiritual "schnorrers."

Now, the first thing that we have to recover is
the Bible. There is a story of a Catholic saint who was
beheaded by his pagan persecutors, but, like a good
saint, he took his head under his arm and walked off.
You smile, and think it perhaps too much of a miracle,
but a Judaism without a Bible is even a greater
miracle. It would mean a headless Judaism, for,
gentlemen, Judaism is not merely an ethical society
placed under the auspices of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob,
Moses and Aaron. Nor may you flatter yourselves
that a few chapters of Lotze, a few chapters of ill-
digested Kant, a few pages from Matthew Arnold's
Literature and Dogma, seasoned with a little Stein-
thalism and a shouting of Evolution — that terrible
word which has wrought more mischief and produced
more platitudes and conceits than the worst theology
ever did, there being not a fifth-rate extension lecturer
who does not feel himself the promise and fulfillment
of all humanity — you may not think that such in-
gredients will go for the making of Judaism.

Judaism is a revealed religion, with sacred writings
revealing the history of the past, making positive

SEMINARY ADDRESSES

demands on the present and holding out solemn
promises for the future. And these sacred writings
are the Bible, and they ought to be the possession of
every Jew, interpreted and commented on in the
Jewish spirit. I am in no way antagonistic to all
that is modern. I confess that my sympathies for
Wellhausen are not very strong and that I have a
tolerable antipathy against "painted Bibles" and
mutilated Scriptures. But I know that the demands
of science are inexorable, and I yield to no one in
respect for such serious men as Dillman, Kuenen and
Delitzsch. But the question may be asked whether
it is really all science that is claimed as such. My
studies within the past years, which centered largely
around the Bible, have convinced me that there is
much in the higher criticism, which is at best theology
of a kind, not philology and history.

But apart from this question there is another
consideration. An old friend of mine once said to me,
"Even if you are able to translate a Psalm, you
understand only the Psalm but not the Psalmist."
Now I put it to you, whether in a school where a man
like Duhm, one of the oracles of higher criticism,
can declare that the Psalms are all mere rancorous
party pamphlets, the Psalmist is understood or not.

Another instance is the attempt by a majority of
higher critics to eliminate the personal element from
the Psalms — I mean the ich question. You will agree
with me, I think, that our grandmothers and grand-
fathers, who did read the Psalms and had a good
cry over them, understood them better than all the
professors. I am not pleading here for an orthodox

EMANCIPATION OF JEWISH SCIENCE 5

commentary to the Bible, but there is a Jewish
liberalism and a Christian liberalism and even from
the point of view of liberalism let a commentary be
written in the spirit of a Jewish and not a Christian
liberalism. Remember that the Bible was not dis-
covered by Cheyne and Wellhausen. We worked
over it thousands of years before the Occidentals could
read a Hebrew sentence correctly. And a Jewish
commentary should give us the opinions of Rashi and
Aben Ezra, Samuel Ben Meir, and others whose words
very often appear in present manuals under the firm
of Dillman, Delitzsch and Ewald. A Jewish com-
mentary will also be free from such blasphemies as
Jahveolatry, the "whimsical God of Israel," and
similar offensive terms. And above all it must teach
us that we are the fulfillment of the word of God,
and that the Old Testament and the whole history of
Israel are not a mere preamble to the history of
Christianity.

But we ought not to be satisfied with the recovery
of the Bible alone. There is a large field of Jewish
post-Biblical history which is our own affair to provide
for. All your universities and colleges do very little
for it. You have probably heard the story of the
French actress who appeared only in the first act,
never knew what became of the hero in the fifth
act, and so believed that the whole story finished with
the incidental family quarrel, occurring at the begin-
ning of the play, in which her role was placed. Now
take Schuerer or Holtzmann or Hausrath and you will
find that with them the history of Judaism terminates
with the unfortunate quarrel which took place be-

SEMINARY ADDRESSES

tween the year thirty and forty of our present era.
They never give a thought to the terrible tragedy and
triumphs upon which the hero Israel but entered at
that period; indeed, they think we have not survived
the family quarrel.

But I hope that no Jewish theologian, to whatever
party he may belong, thinks that the literature cover-
ing the period between the conclusion of the Canon
and the last sermon "published by request" is super-
fluous and non-existent for the modern Jew. And
let me tell you that I think that the reform party
among us (I do not like the term "reform" Jews,
which savors of schism) is as much in need of a thor-
ough and real knowledge of Jewish literature in all
its branches and departments as their orthodox
brethren. Indeed, the orthodox Jew can always take
his manual like the Chochamath Adam or the Kizur
Shulchan Aruch, wherein everything that he has
immediate need of is stated with an enviable precision.
He does not arrogate authority to himself to legislate;
whilst those who are aspiring to authority for change
and selection, if they mean it well with Judaism,
should know where its vital points are, and what
they may touch with impunity and what would mean
suicide, and this knowledge can only be got from
Jewish history and literature. The frequent appeals
to "prophetic Judaism" are largely verbiage; you
cannot live on oxygen alone.

Perhaps you will allow me to conclude with a
passage from the Zohar which I have often used
before, and possibly many others before me, but it
bears repetition. The story runs that a certain Rabbi

EMANCIPATION OF JEWISH SCIENCE 7

once sailed in a ship. When the ship came upon the
high seas, a storm arose and wrecked the vessel.
Down it went; but the Rabbi was a saint, and,
of course, a miracle happened. The vessel came out
at the other side of the globe, and he found men
engaged in prayer; but he did not understand them.
It is supposed by the commentaries, which are still
to be written, that the cause of his inability to under-
stand them was that they did not pray in Hebrew.
But even worse would it be if the religious literature
of the Jews should not be accessible to all the Jews.
And here in New York, where the West and the
East meet in such close proximity, it is especially
necessary if we are all to remain brothers on earth,
as we hope to be in heaven, that our religious litera-
ture should be based on and developed from that
Sacred Book and Sacred Language which have al-
ways been the means of communion between Israel
and Israel, and between Israel and his God.

THE CHARTER OF THE SEMINARY.*

AMONG the regulations relating to the benedic-
tions which the Jew is bound to utter on various
occasions there is one running thus:

DVin csn "(T\2 TOD b$r\w* '•DI^IN nsnn

"He who sees a multitude of Israelites, says the
benediction, Blessed be He who is the sage of all these
mysteries." So far the Rabbis. By mysteries they do
not mean those closet skeletons of which the author
of "Vanity Fair" knew so much, and of which respect-
ability, sometimes even decency, demands that they
should remain hidden away in some dark recess.
Judaism is not a religion that spies upon personal
secrets; and least of all would they be distinguished
by a blessing, the great rule being:

r6p^>pn by p-oo pw

"Decay and decadence are not the special themes
of thanksgiving." What the Rabbis meant here by
"mysteries" was that diversity in feeling and varia-
tion in thinking which confer individuality and
character upon each member of the species, to such a
degree as to crowd our planet with as many micro-
cosms as there are men and women, each governed
by its own laws and moving round its own sun. It
is this individualism which practically makes each
man a profound and complete mystery to the other,
and it was this mystery of individualism, or, as the
* Inaugural Address, delivered November 20, 1902.

10 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

Rabbis phrase it, "the unending variations of mind
and the difference of facial expression" registering
our emotions, that called forth the admiration of
the Rabbis and caused the institution of the blessing.

But nowhere is the force of this mystery more
deeply felt than in addressing an audience recruited
from the Jewish community of this great city of
New York. Like the first man (Adam) in the fable,
whose clay (constituting his body) was gathered from
the four corners of the earth, this community is made
up of the elements drawn from all parts of our globe.
But while the miscellaneous factor in the creation of
the race aimed, as it was fully explained, at making
man a citizen of the world, the same process has had
the very opposite effect with our community. Each
train of arriving immigrants has brought its own
idiosyncrasies and peculiarities, its own ritual and
ceremonies, and its own dogmas and dogmatisms, all
of which are struggling for existence and perpetuation,
thus converting the New World into a multitude of
petty Old Worlds. My stay in this country is not of
sufficiently long duration to justify any authoritative
statement on my part, but even so far as my short
experience goes I can safely say that New York alone
could furnish us with an epitome of all the Judaisms
or Richtungen scattered all over the world, ranging
from the precisionism and mysticism of the Far East
to the advanced radicalism of the Far West, in addi-
tion to the shadowy no-Judaisms hovering on the
borderland.

Such a community is indeed a mystery. And this
mystery has become perplexing; for it is amidst all

THE CHARTER OF THE SEMINARY 11

these Judaisms and no- Judaisms that my colleagues
and myself are called to create a theological centre
which should be all things to all men, reconciling all
parties, and appealing to all sections of the community.
If I understand correctly the intention of those who
honored me with their call, and if I interpret my
own feelings aright, this school should never become
partisan ground or a hotbed of polemics, making
"confusion worse confounded." The name of the
Holy One, blessed be He, is Peace, and the place
erected to His name, and to the cultivation of His
Torah, should, to use the figurative language of the
Rabbis, be the spot on the horizon "where heaven
and earth kiss each other;" while those, who study
there should in some way participate in, and, as it
were, anticipate the mission of Elijah, that was to
consist not only in solving the difficulties of the
Torah, and removing doubt, but also in bringing
back the forcibly estranged, arbitrating between
conflicting opinions, and giving peace to the world.

Divine, however, as the work may be — and it
could certainly not be accomplished without sup-
port from heaven — it is not entirely superhuman, for
the creation of which I have just spoken is not a
Creatio ex nihilo. The foundations are laid and the
materials are given.

I am thinking, in the first instance, of the sainted
Doctor Sabato Morais, the finest specimen of a
Jewish martyr — that is, one who lived, not only
died, as a martyr — whose very appearance was an
inspiration, and whose simplest utterance was a

12 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

stimulus to faith in God and His Torah. His name
will always be remembered for good as the founder
of the Jewish Theological Seminary. For this insti-
tution he lived and labored the last eleven years of
his life, during which he acted as President of the
Faculty, in which his spirit will always remain an
active and living force; the Reverend Doctor Alex-
ander Kohut, the great Jewish scholar and author
of the monumental work Aruch Completum, the
greatest and finest specimen of Hebrew learning
ever produced by any Jew on this continent, who
acted for the last years of his life as Professor of
Midrash and Talmudic Methodology, and even
when death was already overshadowing him spared
himself not, and imparted instruction to the students
of the Seminary. I am further thinking of the
Directors of this institution. The modesty of these
Princes in Israel, which shrinks back from all pub-
licity and adheres conscientiously to the great maxim
that virtue is and must remain its own reward,
forbids me to be explicit. But we may mention here
the names of those departed: Mr. Joseph Blumen-
thal, the President of the old Board of Trustees, to
whose signal devotion this institution owes to a
considerable extent its continued existence; Mr.
Leonard Lewisohn, a devoted Jew, one of our greatest
philanthropists, whose benevolence extended to two
hemispheres, and who was one of the first founders
of the reconstructed Seminary; Doctor Aaron Frie-
denwald, a scholar and a gentleman, who held the
office of Director, both in the old and in the newly

THE CHARTER OF THE SEMINARY 13

constituted Board, and whose interest in the insti-
tution only ceased with life itself. With the Son of
Sirach we should say:

"For a truth these were godly men,
And their hope shall not perish;
With their seed goodness remains sure,
And their inheritance unto children's children;
Their memory standeth forth forever
And their righteousness shall not be forgotten."

With such models of energy and conviction, of
activity and saintliness, the Seminary should not be
at a loss to continue the work which these great
souls have prepared and ripened.

It should, however, be pointed out that the
directors of the reconstructed Seminary have also
given us some excellent hints as to the nature and
character of the work before us. Their words are:

"The Jewish Theological Seminary of America was
incorporated by a law of the State of New York, ap-
proved February 20, 1902, for the perpetuation of the
tenets of the Jewish religion, the cultivation of Hebrew
literature, the pursuit of Biblical and archaeological
research, the advancement of Jewish scholarship, the
establishment of a library and for the education and
training of Jewish rabbis and teachers."

These words are taken from the Charter, forming
the constitution of the Seminary, but, like all consti-
tutions, this also may profitably be submitted to the
process of interpretation and expansion. This
method we call Midrash. To this Midrash the rest
of my address will be largely devoted.

Put into somewhat less technical, or rather less
legal terms, the ideals at which the Directors of this

14 SEMI N A RY A DDRESSES

institution aim are the promotion of Jewish learning
and the training for the Jewish ministry. By learn-
ing or scholarship we understand a thorough and
accurate knowledge of Jewish literature, or at least
of parts of it. The duty of accuracy, even in the most
minute details of a subject, cannot be shirked.
"Through my intercourse with great men," says
Humboldt in his Cosmos, "I early arrived at the con-
viction that without a serious attention to details
all generalizations and theories of the universe are
mere phantasms." I know that the acquiring of
details is a very tiresome and wearisome affair, and
may well be described in the language of the old
Rabbis: "The part of wisdom learned under wrath."
But, unfortunately, there is no "snapshot" process
for acquiring learning. It has its methods and laws,
as ancient as time itself, and these none can evade or
escape. "If a man will tell thee," the old saying was,
"I have found Wisdom, but labored not (for it),
believe him not." The probability is that he found
nothing worth having.

It is true that occasionally we speak of a "Re-
public of Letters," a term which may be interpreted
to imply that a certain freedom of treatment is
granted to genius. Apart, however, from the fact
that we are not all Shakespeares or Goethes, or even
Walt Whitmans, it should be remembered that
Republicanism does not mean anarchy. Bad gram-
mar, faulty construction, wrong quotations and mis-
translations mean with the student in the domain
of literature what lawlessness and anarchy mean to
the citizen in common life. And much as we may
differ as to the eccentricities of a Walt Whitman,

THE CHARTER OF THE SEMINARY 15

I am sure that we will all agree that ignorance of
the language of the sacred literature of Israel in
persons undertaking to teach Judaism has by no
means any claim upon our forbearance as the vagary
of genius, and has to be opposed as objectionable
and pernicious.

Not less objectionable than actual ignorance is
artificial ignorance. By this I understand that
peculiar attitude of mind which, cognizant of the
fact that there were such things as the eighteenth
century and nineteenth century, with their various
movements and revolutions in all departments of
human thought, somehow manages to reduce them
to a blank, as if they had not been. My friends, they
have been! There has been such a thing as a ration-
alistic school, though not all its members have been
rational. There has been such a thing as a critical
school, though not all its adherents have been real
critics. Arianism of the vulgar sort, and Marcion-
ism of the nineteenth century type, have had their
share in this work. There has been such a thing as
an historical school, although not all those who were
of it interpreted history in the right way. All these
movements are solemn facts, and they can as little
be argued away by mere silence as pain and suffering
can be removed from the world by the methods of
Christian Science.

Mark, too, that there is no intellectual wave that
breaks upon our mental horizon, which, disastrous as
it may appear to us, will not have some beneficial
effect in the end. It may wreak desolation when it
comes; it may leave the beach strewn with loathsome
monsters when it recedes, but at the same time it will

16 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

deposit a residuum of fresh matter, often fruitful
and fructifying. To give one instance from our own
history, I will only recall to your minds the Karaitic
Schism. Vile and violent were its attacks upon the
tradition of the Fathers, and the breach is not healed
to this very day, but it had also the blessed effect of
giving a wholesome impetus to the study of the Bible,
which resulted in producing a school of Grammarians
and Exegetes, and perhaps also of Massorites, such
as Judaism had never seen before.

Thus these movements may all contain grains and
germs of truth, or at least may provide the nidus for
the further development of truth, and with all this the
student must be made acquainted. What they have
to offer may not always be pleasant to hear, but this
must be accepted as a judgment of God, passed upon
us for allowing our inheritance — especially the Bible
— to be turned over to strangers. At the same time
the follies and extravagances, occasionally also the
ineffable ignorance displayed by some of the leaders
of these movements should also be exposed, for the
demand they make for blind faith in the hypotheses
they advance is even more exacting than that made
by the old orthodoxies, and young men should be
warned against their pretensions. "Even the youngest
amongst us may sometimes err," was the answer of a
master of Trinity College, Cambridge, to a forward
youth, and similarly I venture to express the pos-
sibility that even the "newest" among us may some-
times go wrong.

The crown and climax of all learning is research.
The object of this searching is truth — that truth

THE CHARTER OF THE SEMINARY 17

which gives unity to history and harmony to the
phenomena of nature, and brings order into a universe
in which the naked eye perceives only strife and chance.
But while in search of this truth, of which man is
hardly permitted more than a faint glimpse, the
student not only re-examines the old sources, but is
on the constant lookout for fresh material and new
fields of exploration. These enable him to supply
a link here and to fill out a gap there, thus contrib-
uting his humble share to the sum total of truth,
which by the grace of God, is in a process of con-
stant self -revelation.

I may, perhaps, point out in passing, as I did on
a somewhat similar occasion, "that this passionate
devotion to the study of ancient MSS., which you
may possibly have observed in some students, has
not its source in mere antiquarianism or love of
curios. The famous R. Nissim Gaon, the correspond-
ent of R. Sherira and R. Hai Gaon, the author of the
Maf teach, says, in the introduction to his work:
"And I entreat everybody who will profit by the
study of this book to pray to God for me and to
cause me to find mercy whether I am alive or dead."
Nowadays we are not always in a praying mood.
With Hegel, some of us believe that thinking is also
praying. But the sensation we experience in our
work is not unlike that which should accompany our
devotions. Every discovery of an ancient document
giving evidence of a bygone world is, if undertaken in
the right spirit — that is, for the honor of God and
the truth and not for the glory of self — an act of
resurrection in miniature. How the past suddenly

18 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

rushes in upon you with all its joys and woes! And
there is a spark of a human soul like yours come to
light again after a disappearance of centuries, crying
for sympathy and mercy, even as R. Nissim did.
You dare not neglect the appeal and slay this soul
again. Unless you choose to become another Cain
you must be the keeper of your brother and give
him a fair hearing. You pray with him if he hap-
pens to be a liturgist; you grieve with him if the
impress left by him in your mind is that of suffer-
ing; you fight for him if his voice is that of ardent
partisanship, and you even doubt with him if the
garb in which he makes his appearance is that of
an honest skeptic — "Souls can only be kissed through
the medium of sympathy."

But it is with truth as it is with other ideals and
sacred possessions of man. "Every generation," the
ancient Rabbis say, "which did not live to see the
rebuilding of the Holy Temple must consider itself
as if it had witnessed its destruction." Similarly we
may say that every age which has not made some
essential contribution to the erection of the Temple
of Truth and real Wissenschaft is bound to look upon
itself as if it had been instrumental in its demolition.
For it is these fresh contributions and the opening of
new sources, with the new currents they create, that
keep the intellectual and the spiritual atmosphere in
motion and impart to it life and vigor. But when,
through mental inertia and moral sloth, these fresh
sources are allowed to dry, stagnation and decay are
sure to set in. The same things happen which came'
to pass when Israel's sanctuary was consumed in fire.

THE CHARTER OF THE SEMINARY 19

Said R. Phineas ben Yair: "Since the day on which
the Holy Temple was destroyed, the socii, Q^~cn
sons of freedom, lie under the cloud of shame, and
their heads are covered (in mourning) ; men of (real)
deeds are neglected, while the 'men of elbow' and the
'masters of the tongue' gain strength."

I have thus far spoken of the Seminary as a place
of learning. We must now proceed to consider it in
its particular aspect as a training school for the Jewish
ministry. Now, we all agree that the office of a Jew-
ish minister is to teach Judaism; he should accordingly
receive such a training as to enable him to say:
"Judaeici nihil a me alienum puto" "I regard nothing
Jewish as foreign to me." He should know every-
thing Jewish — Bible, Talmud, Midrash, Liturgy,
Jewish ethics and Jewish philosophy; Jewish history
and Jewish mysticism, and even Jewish folklore.
None of these subjects, with its various ramifica-
tions, should be entirely strange to him.

Remember, my friends, that there is no waste in
the world of thought. Every good action, the mystics
say, creates an angel; and every real thought/it may
be said, creates even something better; it creates
men and women. In spite of all our "modernity,"
most of our sentiments are "nothing else but organized
traditions; our thoughts nothing else but reminis-
censes, conscious and unconscious," while in our
actions we are largely executive officers, carrying
out the ordinances passed by a wise legislation of
many years ago. We dare not neglect any part of
this great intellectual bequest but at a serious
risk and peril to ourselves. And the risk is the greater

20 SEMI N A RY A DDRESSES

in Jewish literature — a literature pregnant with
"thoughts that breathe and words that burn,"
whose very pseudography became the sacred books
of other nations, whose most homely metaphors
were converted from literature into dogma. Nay, the
very misunderstanding and misinterpretation of its
terminology have given rise to a multitude of sects
and orthodoxies and heresies still dividing humanity.

It is with the purpose of avoiding this risk that
we — my colleagues and I — tried to draw up the
curriculum of studies for the classes, in such a way
as to include in it almost every branch of Jewish
literature. We cannot, naturally, hope to carry the
student through all these vast fields of learning at
the cultivation of which humanity has now worked
for nearly four thousand years. But this fact must
not prevent us from making the attempt to bring
the students on terms of acquaintance at least with
all those manifestations of Jewish life and Jewish
thought which may prove useful to them as future
ministers, and suggestive and stimulating to them
as prospective scholars.

It is hardly necessary to remark that the Jewish
ministry and Jewish scholarship are not irreconcil-
able. The usefulness of a minister does not increase
in an inverse ratio to his knowledge — as little as bad
grammar is specially conducive to morality and
holiness. Zunz's motto was, "Real knowledge creates
action" (thatenerzeugen d) , and the existence of such
men as R. Saadya Gaon and R. Hai Gaon, Maimon-
ides, and Nachmanides, R. Joseph Caro and R. Isaac
Abarbanel, Samson Raphael Hirsch and Abraham

THE CHARTER OF THE SEMINARY 21

Geiger, and an innumerable host of other spiritual
kings in Israel, all ' 'mighty in the battles of the
Torah," and voluminous authors, and at the same
time living among their people and for their people
and influencing contemporaries, and still at this very
moment swaying the actions and opinions of men —
all these bear ample testimony to the truth of Zunz's
maxim. No, ignorance is not such bliss as to make
special efforts necessary to acquire it. There is no
cause to be afraid of much learning, or, rather, of
much teaching. The difficulty under which we
labor is rather that there are subjects which cannot
be taught, and yet do form an essential part of the
equipment of a Jewish minister.

But first let me say a few words about the general
religious tendency this Seminary will follow. I am
not unaware that this is a very delicate point, and
prudence would dictate silence or evasion. But life
would hardly be worth living without occasional
blundering, "the only relief from dull correctness."
Besides, if there be in American history one fact more
clearly proved than any other it is that "know-nothing-
ism" was an absolute and miserable failure. I must
not fall into the same error. And thus, sincerely
asking forgiveness of all my dearest friends and
dearest enemies with whom it may be my misfor-
tune to differ, I declare, in all humility, but most
emphatically, that I do know something. And this
is that the religion in which the Jewish ministry
should be trained must be specifically and purely
Jewish, without any alloy or adulteration. Judaism
must stand or fall by that which distinguishes it

22 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

from other religions as well as by that which it has
in common with them. Judaism is not a religion
which does not oppose itself to anything in par-
ticular. Judaism is opposed to any number of things,
and says distinctly "thou shalt not." It permeates
the whole of your life. It demands control over all
your actions, and interferes even with your menu.
It sanctifies the seasons, and regulates your history,
both in the past and in the future. Above all, it
teaches that disobedience is the strength of sin. It
insists upon the observance both of the spirit and of
the letter; spirit without letter belongs to the species
known to the mystics as "nude souls" pS^tD^y pfiOBtt
wandering about in the universe without balance and
without consistency, the play of all possible currents
and changes in the atmosphere. In a word, Judaism
is absolutely incompatible with the abandonment of
the Torah. Nay, the very prophet or seer must bring
his imprimatur from the Torah. The assertion that
the destruction of the Law is its fulfillment is a mere
paradox, and recalls strongly the doctrines of Sir
Boyle Roche, "the inimitable maker of Irish bulls."
He declared emphatically that he "would give up a
part, and, if necessary, the whole of the constitution,
to preserve the remainder!"

President Abraham Lincoln, the wisest and great-
est of rulers, addressed Congress on some occasion
of great emergency with the words: "Fellow citizens,
we cannot escape history." Nor can we, my friends.
The past, with its long chain of events, with its woes
and joys, with its tragedies and romances, with its
customs and usages, and above all, with its bequest

THE CHARTER OF THE SEMINARY 23

of the Torah, the great entail of the children of
Israel, has become an integral and inalienable part
of ourselves, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.
We must make an end to these constant amputa-
tions if we do not wish to see the body of "Israel"
bleed to death before our very eyes. We must leave
off talking about Occidentalizing our religion — as if
the Occident has ever shown the least genius for
religion — or freeing the conscience by abolishing
various laws. These, and similar platitudes and stock
phrases borrowed from Christian apologetics, must
be abandoned entirely if we do not want to drift
slowly but surely into Paulinism, which entered the
world as the deadliest enemy of Judaism, pursued
it through all its course and is still finding its abettors
among us, working for their own destruction. Lord,
forgive them, for they know nothing. Those who
are entrusted with carrying out the purpose of this
institution, which, as you have seen, aims at the
perpetuation of the tenets of the Jewish religion,
both pupils and masters, must faithfully and man-
fully maintain their loyalty to the Torah. There is
no other Jewish religion but that taught by the Torah
and confirmed by history and tradition, and sunk
into the conscience of Catholic Israel.

I have just hinted at the desirability of masters
and pupils working for one common end. You must
not think that our intention is to convert this school
of learning into a drill ground where young men will
be forced into a certain groove of thinking, or,
rather, not thinking; and after being equipped with
a few devotional texts, and supplied with certain

24 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

catchwords, will be let loose upon an unsuspecting
public to proclaim their own virtues and the infal-
libility of their masters. Nothing is further from our
thoughts. I once heard a friend of mine exclaim
angrily to a pupil: "Sir, how dare you always agree
with me?" I do not even profess to agree with my-
self always, and I would consider my work, to which,
with the help of God, I am going to devote the rest
of my life, a complete failure if this institution would
not in the future produce such extremes as on the
one side a raving mystic who would denounce me
as a sober Philistine; on the other side, an advanced
critic, who would rail at me as a narrow-minded fa-
natic, while a third devotee of strict orthodoxy would
raise protest against any critical views I may enter-
tain. "We take," says Montaigne, "other men's
knowledge on trust, which is idle and superficial
learning. We must make it our own." The Rabbis
express the same thought with allusion to Ps. 1 : 2
which they explain to mean that what is first — at
the initiation of man into the Law — God's Torah,
becomes, after a sufficient study, man's own Torah.
Nay, God even deigns to descend to man's own level
so as not to interfere with his individuality and
powers of conception. I reproduce in paraphrase a
passage from a Midrash: "Behold now how the voice
of Sinai goes forth to all in Israel attuned to the
capacity of each; appealing to the sages according
to their wisdom; to the virile according to their
strength; to the young according to their aspiring
youthfulness, and to the children and babes according
to their innocence; aye, even to the women according

THE CHARTER OF THE SEMINARY 25

to their motherhood." All that I plead for is that the
voice should come from Sinai, not from Golgotha;
that it should be the voice of Jacob, not of Esau. The
Torah gave spiritual accommodation for thousands
of years to all sorts and conditions of men, sages,
philosophers, scholars, mystics, casuists, school men
and skeptics; and it should also prove broad enough
to harbor the different minds of the present century.
Any attempt to place the centre of gravity outside
of the Torah must end in disaster. We must not
flatter ourselves that we shall be allowed to land some-
where midway, say in some Omar Khayyam cult or
in some Positivists' society or in some other agnostic
makeshift. No, my friends, there are laws of gravita-
tion in the spiritual as there are in the physical world ;
we cannot create halting places at will. We must
either remain faithful to history or go the way of all
flesh, and join the great majority. The teaching in
the Seminary will be in keeping with this spirit, and
thus largely confined to the exposition and elucidation
of historical Judaism in its various manifestations.
But, as I have hinted before, not everything can
be taught. I am referring to those things undefin-
able, which may be best described by using the
Talmudic phrase "things handed over to the heart,"
which cannot be imparted by word of mouth, or by
any visible sign. Take, for instance, the Fifty-first
Psalm, commencing "Have mercy upon me, O God!"
We have the means of teaching how to parse the
Hebrew and how to render it into fair English, but
we are utterly helpless should we attempt to convey
any idea of the agony and anguish which wrung from

26 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

the Psalmist this cry — of the misery and bitterness
which he felt at the thought that transgression and
sin may lead to his being cast away from the presence
of God, and to the loss of His Holy spirit; and of the
sudden exaltation and gladness he experienced in
anticipating the time when a broken heart and a
contrite spirit would bring back to him the lost joy
of salvation and restore the interrupted communion
between the repentant son and his Father in heaven.
Or take the concluding lines of the Malchiyoth bene-
diction on New Year's Day that read: "Our God
and God of our fathers, reign Thou in Thy glory
over the whole universe and be exalted above all the
earth in Thine honor, and shine forth in the splendor
and excellence of Thy might upon all the inhabitants
of Thy world." We can easily lecture on the history
of this prayer, and even make a guess as to its date
and authorship, but we should certainly fail were
we to try to make one understand what the King-
dom of God on earth really meant for the saints of
Israel, whose whole life was nothing else than a prepa-
ration for entering into the Kingdom. Wooden theo-
logians speak of a theocracy as a sort of Jewish
hierarchy after the Roman model, only with a Rabbi
Maximus as its head. This was not the ideal for
which so many noble men and women suffered mar-
tyrdom and which inspired the great "Unknown" to
his divine poem, "["D^ bl Vr\W( the Jewish "Mar-
seillaise." It was the blissful vision of love triumphant,
righteousness triumphant, truth triumphant, which
animated and dictated these lines. But here I am
explaining dark riddles by obscure terms. Or lastly,

THE CHARTER OF THE SEMINARY 27

take the first lines of R. Jehuda Ha-Levi's poem on
the advent of the Sabbath, running thus: 'To Thy
love I drink my cup." The Sabbath was for him a
reality in which Israel's sweet singer saw a reflex of
the great Sabbath when the Kingdom of God would
be established. But how one can fall in love with
such an abstract idea as a span of time can only be
divined by love itself. In the famous Praise of Wis-
dom, Sophia or the Torah proclaims: "I am the
mother of fair love and fear and knowledge and holy
hope." But it is only filial devotion which will elicit
a mother's answer and touch the mystic chord of
things undefinable, only transmissible through the
means of an appeal from soul to soul. But suppose
a person has no soul, or, what comes to the same
thing, persuades himself he has none? "Saving souls"
is a favorite phrase with theologians. The soul
being, according to Jewish mystics — long before
Emerson — a spark of the divine essence itself, I
never believed it to be in much need of artificial aids
to salvation. The "Spirit shall return unto God who
gave it," even against the will of theologians if need
be. Our real difficulty is how to help the men with-
out souls!

Another problem presenting itself is how we are
to teach the subject or thing called Life. I hardly
need say that by Life I do not understand skill in
arranging socials and other attractions, or ingenuity
in inventing sensational sermon headings. This is
not Life. Everything tending to what is common or
sensational must needs starve our better selves and
ultimately result in spiritual death. What I mean by

28 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

this term is the capacity for dealing with those oc-
casions in our earthly career, which, by reason of
intense joys or overwhelming sorrow or the tender
sympathy which they evoke, crowd years into mo-
ments, and form, so to speak, portions of life in con-
densation. These occasions have always been con-
trolled and assisted by religion. Of certain of these
the Catholic Church has made sacraments, as in the
case of marriage and death, and it has also created
special Orders devoted to the work among the needy
and the helpless. The Protestant Church has also
its Settlements and has introduced into its seminaries
pastoral theology, aiming, among other things, to
instruct its clergy in the works of love and charity.
But it must be confessed that we are still somewhat
behind in this last respect.

Pray let there be no misunderstanding about this
point. The discovery of the virtue of charity is not
quite contemporaneous with the coining of that
barbaric word Altruism. The administration of
charity was one of the earliest functions of the
Synagogue, from which it was borrowed by the
primitive Church, like so many other institutions.
But recognizing no difference between the laity and
the priesthood, or "Rabbihood," the exercise of
this function was not limited to any Order or special
caste. The practice of the work of loving kindness,
or Gemilath Chasadim, a term including everything
we understand by philanthropic and social work,
had, as you know from your prayer book, no fixed
measure, and all classes of the community shared it.
With regard to visiting the sick and ministering to

THE CHARTER OF THE SEMINARY 29

the dying, I will only call to mind the oldest Jewish
Society, the WTp Kl^n a kind of Sacred Brother-
hood, whose duty it was to nurse those who had
nobody to attend to them, to be present at the su-
preme moment of man's existence, and to read the
prescribed prayers there, to arrange and prepare
for the funeral procession and decent burial, and to
comfort the mourners by reciting prayers and "speak-
ing to their hearts." All these services were per-
formed voluntarily and gratuitously, and those who
performed them came from all classes of the com-
munity, men and women.

But times have changed; charity has become to
some extent — I hope not entirely — a science, and a
certain knowledge of political economy and sociology
is required for its proper administration. It is there-
fore deemed advisable that the minister, who, as a
rule, is connected with our charitable institutions,
either as an active member of the board of manage-
ment or as the spiritual adviser of the directors, should
receive some training in the aforementioned subjects,
Again, we live now in the age of specialization. Fu-
nerals and burials have been raised to the dignity of
a fine art, and praying has become a close profession.
The old Sacred Brotherhoods thus had to disappear,
and their work mostly devolves now upon the minis-
ter. But how should we approach this part of our
instruction? It should be remembered that the old
Sacred Brotherhoods were, as already said, volun-
tary societies, and the very fact of a man's joining
them testified to his fitness to engage in the works
of mercy and loving-kindness. But a man may show

30 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

the most brilliant record of undergraduate days and
yet be utterly wanting in tact, delicacy, patience,
sympathy, forbearance and similar qualities neces-
sary for the office of pastor. Sometimes a certain
unwillingness to allow students to share in work of
this kind is shown on the part of those who have a
right to protest. The Jerusalem Talmud records a
story of a famous Rabbi of Caesarea who sent his
son to Tiberias "to acquire merit there" by studying
Torah in the Rabbinic Academies of that city.
But the youth, instead of attending to his lessons
and lectures, became a "Gomel Chesed," or, as we
should now say, devoted himself to social work.
His specialty was, it seems, that of burying the
dead. Whereupon his father wrote to him: "Is it
because there were no graves in Caesarea that I
sent thee to Tiberias?" • This happened somewhere
about the end of the third century, but in this respect
times have not changed as far as my knowledge of
universities and seminaries goes. Parents and
guardians still object to their sons or wards attending:
funerals instead of lectures. But there is also another
grave consideration. The social work included under
the name of Gemilath Chasadim forms in Judaism a
part of Israel's great Imitatio Dei. The Holy One,
blessed be He, set the example Himself of performing
deeds of kindness to His creatures, and it is incum-
bent upon the whole of Israel, "the suite of the King,"'
as the ancients expressed it, to fashion their ways
after the King. And I consider it not without danger
to create a religious aristocracy which might soon
claim the King entirely for themselves, and crowd
the rest of us out from His Divine Presence. Such

THE CHARTER OF THE SEMINARY 31

things have happened in other communities and
may also happen to us when we create a separate
class of religieuses with a special purpose of assisting
us in the most sacred, but also the most sensitive
and weakest, moments of our being.

George Eliot, in a letter to a spiritual correspond-
ent, says: 'The great thing is to do without chloro-
form." Judaism not only did without chloroform,
but, retaining its freshness and vigor, it also did with-
out crutches, and found its way to heaven without
any aid from man: it never employed spiritual
derricks. If a Jew wanted to pray, he prayed. If
he felt anxiety about his soul, he said: "Into Thy
hands I commit my spirit; Thou hast redeemed me,
O Lord, God of Truth." If he felt the need of re-
ligious comfort, he read a Psalm or two and had a
good cry over that, and he received assurance; and
if he was in the home of a dying friend he read :
"Hear, O Israel!" f?*Ctr >'EtT and a few other vers-
es acknowledging the unity of God and His reign,
and he felt sure that both he and his departed friend
would have their share in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Now, on account of the frequent amputations, we
have lost our vigor and have suddenly grown old and
seem to be in need of artificial support, like other
denominations. The support has to be created.
The circumstances require it. But, as I have said,
the experiment is risky, and we can only pray with
the Psalmist that God lead us in the path of right-
eousness for His name's sake.

However, I will not dwell any longer on our trou-
bles and difficulties. Be they ever so many, and ever
so serious, the old dictum of the Rabbi still holds

32 SEMI N A RY A DDRESSES

good: "It is not incumbent upon thee to finish the
work, neither art thou free to desist from it," and
least of all dare we desist from our work; we whom
Providence has transplanted into this great and
glorious country, and each of whom may verily say
with Joseph, "God did send me before you to pre-
serve life."

My friends, in a letter by Maimonides, addressed
to the Wise Men of Lunel, there occurs a passage to
the following effect: "Be it known unto you, my
masters and friends, that in these hard times none
are left to lift up the standard of Moses and inquire
into the world of the Rabbis but you. I am certain
that you and the cities near you are continually estab-
lishing places of learning and that you are men of
wisdom and understanding. From all other places
the Torah has utterly disappeared. The majority
of the great countries are (spiritually) dead. The
minority is in extremis, while three or four places are
in a state of convalescence. * * * It is also
known unto you what persecutions have been de-
creed against the Jewish population of the West (of
Europe). There is no help left to us but in you,
our brethren, even the men of our kindred. Be of
good courage, and let us behave ourselves valiantly,
for our people and for the cities of God, since you are
manly men and men of power."

This letter was written by Maimonides some seven
hundred years ago. But how little times have
changed. Substitute the words East or Northeast
for West, and you have the tragedy repeated before
your very eyes. It is now the East — from our part
of the globe — which is old and ill, where persecution

THE CHARTER OF THE SEMINARY 33

has been decreed, and which, if not actually dead,
is very nearly in extremis] while it is the West that is
throbbing with life and healthy activity, which is
full of men of understanding and wisdom, of power
and of influence. To these I venture to repeat the
words of Scripture in the sense in which they were
used by Maimonides: "Be of good courage and let
us behave ourselves valiantly, for ourselves, and for
the cities of our God." Perhaps I may also repeat
here another sentence of Maimonides: "Think not
of thyself slightly, and do not despair of perfection."
Whether we shall reach perfection in this or any other
task relating to Judaism which the great men of
Israel of this country have set before themselves,
only the future can decide. But there is no reason
for despairing; and the possibility of failure must
in no way deter us.

There is a passage in the Talmud: "It is not a
great honor for the princess when her praise comes
from her friend; it should come from her rival."
Ernest Renan, who never quite laid aside his St.
Sulpice frock, and was never entirely free from Aryan
prejudices, was certainly a rival, but he was a man
of genius, and in spite of himself could not help
occasionally saying true things; and his words are:
"There will continue to be in Israel profound dream-
ers to assert that the work of God will never be
complete until His true saints shall reign therein (in
the world). At the root of the lofty morality of this
people is a longing that is never satisfied. The true
Israelite is he who, in his discontent, thirsts always
for the future, and the race is not yet ready to fail."
By the help of God we shall not fail.

HIGHER CRITICISM— HIGHER ANTI-
SEMITISM.*

MY ACQUAINTANCE with Dr. Kohler dates
from the year 1901, when he did me the honor
of paying me a visit at Cambridge, England. There
is no scarcity in that ancient seat of learning, "full
of sages and scribes," of learned conversation. But
the day with Dr. Kohler was one of the most delightful
I have ever experienced in that place. The day was
spent in roaming over the contents of the Genizah and
in conversation. Our thoughts were turned to Judaism
and the subjects which occupied our minds were all
of a theological or historical nature. We probably
differed in a good many points, and please God we
shall differ in many more — but this did not prevent
our short acquaintance from ripening at once into
what might approach friendship. I felt that I was
in the presence of a scholar and a seeker after truth.
His is an intellect devoted entirely to what he con-
siders the truth, and his is a heart deeply affected
by every spiritual sensation which is in the air. He
also delights to engage in what he considers the
"Battles of the Lord," and Judaism has need for men
of valor.

To speak more clearly : Since the so-called emanci-
pation, the Jews of the civilized world have been
lulled into a fancied security which events have not

*Address delivered at Judaean Banquet, given in honor of Dr.
Kaufman Kohler, March 26, 1903.

36 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

justified. It is true that through the revelations in
the Dreyfus case, anti-Semitism of the vulgar sort
has become odious, and no lady or gentleman dares
now to use the old weapons of the times of Drumont
and Stoecker. But the arch-enemy has entered upon
a new phase, which Boerne might have called "the
philosophic 'Hep-Hep.' ' And this is the more
dangerous phase because it is of a spiritual kind, and
thus means the "excision of the soul," leaving us
no hope for immortality. I remember when I used
to come home from the Cheder, bleeding and crying
from the wounds inflicted upon me by the Christian
boys, my father used to say, "My child, we are in
Galuth (exile), and we must submit to God's will."
And he made me understand that this is only a
passing stage in history, as we Jews belong to eternity,
when God will comfort His people. Thus the pain
was only physical, but my real suffering began later
in life, when I emigrated from Roumania to so-called
civilized countries and found there what I might call
the Higher anti-Semitism, which burns the soul
though it leaves the body unhurt. The genesis of
this Higher anti-Semitism is partly, though not en-
tirely— for a man like Kuenen belongs to an entirely
different class — contemporaneous with the genesis
of the so-called Higher criticism of the Bible. Well-
hausen's Prolegomena and History are teeming with
aperies full of venom against Judaism, and you cannot
wonder that he was rewarded by one of the highest
orders which the Prussian Government had to bestow.
Afterwards Harnack entered into the arena with his
"Wesen des Christenthums," in which he showed not so

HIGHER CRITICISM— HIGHER ANTI-SEMITISM 37

much his hatred as his ignorance of Judaism. But
this Higher anti-Semitism has now reached its climax
when every discovery of recent years is called to bear
witness against us and to accuse us of spiritual larceny.
Some time ago I saw in one of the numerous sheets
of this country a reference to the Hammurabi Code,
concluding with the words, "this means a blow to
Orthodoxy." I hold no brief for Orthodoxy in this
country or elsewhere. But, may I ask: Is there any
wing in Judaism which is prepared to confirm the
reproach of Carlyle, who, in one of his anti-Semitic
fits, exclaimed, 'The Jews are always dealing in old
clothes; spiritual or material." We are here between
ourselves, so we may frankly make the confession that
we did not invent the art of printing; we did not
discover America, in spite of Kayserling; we did not
inaugurate the French Revolution, in spite of some
one else; we were not the first to utilize the power of
steam or electricity, in spite of any future Kayserling.
Our great claim to the gratitude of mankind is that
we gave to the world the word of God, the Bible. We
have stormed heaven to snatch down this heavenly
gift, as the Paitanic expression is; we threw ourselves
into the breach and covered it with our bodies against
every attack; we allowed ourselves to be slain by
hundreds and thousands rather than become unfaith-
ful to it; and we bore witness to its truth and watched
over its purity in the face of a hostile world. The
Bible is our sole raison d'etre, and it is just this which
the Higher anti-Semitism is seeking to destroy,
denying all our claims for the past, and leaving u
without hope for the future.

38 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

Can any section among us afford to concede to
this professorial and imperial anti-Semitism and
confess "for a truth we and our ancestors have
sinned;" we have lived on false pretenses and were
the worst shams in the world? Forget not that we
live in an historical age in which everybody must
show his credentials from the past. The Bible is our
patent of nobility granted to us by the Almighty
God, and if we disown the Bible, leaving it to the
tender mercies of a Wellhausen, Stade and Duhm, and
other beautiful souls working away at diminishing the
"nimbus of the Chosen People," the world will disown
us. There is no room in it for spiritual parvenus.
But this intellectual persecution can only be fought
by intellectual weapons and unless we make an effort
to recover our Bible and to think out our theology
for ourselves, we are irrevocably lost from both
worlds. A mere protest in the pulpit or a vigorous
editorial in a paper, or an amateur essay in a monthly,
or even a special monograph will not help us. We
have to create a really living, great literature, and
do the same for the subjects of theology and the
Bible that Europe has done for Jewish history and
philology. It is in view of this fact that I hail
Dr. Kohler's election to the Presidency of the Hebrew
Union College as a happy event in the annals of
American Jewry; for under his guidance I am sure
Cincinnati will, in good time, contribute its share
to this great "battle of duty." Some amiable per-
sons predict jealousy and strife between the two
colleges, and are already preparing to enjoy the fight
as disinterested spectators. I am certain that they

HIGHER CRITICISM— HIGHER ANTI-SEMITISM 39

will prove false prophets, for the old dictum that the
students of the Torah increase peace in the world,
holds good also in our day. But let me say to you
that this yearning after peace, on my part, is not to be
taken as a sign of my entertaining any doubt as to
the soundness of my theological position, or fear of
a strenuous life. I am, as a rule, not given to mental
squinting, nor have I ever shunned a fight. But I
honor and admire Dr. Kohler too much to take up
the position of an antagonist. Besides, you have
probably heard the story of that Methodist parson
who rebuked one of his parishioners who occasionally
indulged in wife-beating, with the words: "How
can you spend your time in fighting your wife, when
you both should be fighting the devil?" In fact,
I feel that we are standing now before a crisis which
would stigmatize the indulgence in such a fight as
treason to the cause of Judaism; we must gather our
forces and fight the enemy; and Dr. Kohler, by his
wide learning, contagious enthusiasm and noble
character, is the right man in the right place to
marshal a part of these forces, which may, by the
blessing of God, help us to victory.

THE SEMINARY AS A WITNESS.*

JAMES Russell Lowell in one of his political essays
laid down the principle that it is the duty of every
great nation to produce great men. With all due
deference to all sorts of mediocrities, I venture to
say that the same principle is to be applied to matters
spiritual, and that it is also the duty of every great
religion to produce great men. In the absence of
these — the great men — a nation is apt to degenerate
into a mere mob governed by the petty and selfish
interests of its various factions, without any vitalizing
and uniting principle to sustain it on its day of peril ;
while religion in a similar condition is sure to dissolve
into a mere series of excitements of ranting sects,
without any philosophy and inspiring idea, and liable
to become the prey of all sorts of quacks and flaring
orators, who are certain to forsake it at the prospect
of some fresh sensation, or the bidding of some new
fashion. The great men are not frequent; in fact,
they belong to the section of humanity of which the
Rabbis have said that they are so few that the
Holy One, blessed be He, distributed them over all
generations so that humanity at large may profit by
their counsel; as it is said (I Samuel 2:8), "For the
rocks of the earth are the Lord's, and He set the
world upon them."

But however rare they may be, the rocks do exist,
notwithstanding all demagogic clamor which would

*Address delivered at the Dedication of the Seminary Building,
April 26, 1903.

42 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

make us believe that heaven particularly favors
the gravel.

Now, if we do not want to earn the opprobrium of
our enemies, reproaching us with being too mechanical,
the mission of seminaries should prominently consist
in providing religion with great men who would prove
to be its very rocks and pillars. But what are the
conditions under which greatness must develop?
They are many and manifold, and the time at my
disposal makes it impossible to enter here into de-
tails, but with your kind permission I will say a few
words on one or two of these conditions, which are
of a more general character, and which seem to me
to be of the utmost importance for the prosperity of
our religious institutions. The first condition is
the creation of a proper spiritual atmosphere.

An ancient Rabbinic tractate dealing with the
methods of acquiring wisdom counts not less than
forty-eight qualifications which the student should
possess. But apart from the few intellectual qualifi-
cations, which are, after all, a gift of nature, they may
all be summed up in the single Hebrew word, ilOB^
Lishmah, which means the study of the Torah for
the sake of God, without an eye to any worldly
advantages. "Say not," teaches the Sifre, "I will
study Torah in order that I may attain the title of
Rabbi or Chacham, or that I may get a salary, or
that I may be rewarded for it in the world to come, but
devote thyself to it for the sake of the love of God."

This is not a very practical program. Modern
conditions make it necessary, I am afraid, that even
our training schools for the sacred calling should be

THE SEMINARY AS A WITNESS 43

largely conducted on the unsacred principle of the
ultimate material success of the alumni. But let us
not be too successful. For it is this consideration of
ulterior motives which is responsible for the fact
that latter day Judaism is almost entirely devoid of
the element of saintliness, without which religion
itself becomes profane and secularized.

It is very difficult to give an exact definition of
saintliness. Saintliness is the last in the scale of
the ten virtues leading up to the gift of the Holy
Spirit (Ruach Hakodesh), and as such it defies
analysis; but it may perhaps be dimly described as
the feminine — not feminized — element of religion,
furnishing it with the compounds of delicacy and
chasteness. It shudders at the touch of anything
sensational or vulgar; it shrinks back from all pub-
licity, for it is "the glory of the king's daughter to
be within," not on the market place and thorough-
fares. It is unpractical and self-sacrificing, and
certainly not free from ascetic tendencies. It labors
more with the heart than with the lungs, but its very
silence is eloquent. A glance, or a nod of approval
or a sigh, not to say a tear coming from one in pos-
session of saintliness, is with noble and sensitive souls
more effective than cartloads of volumes of finished
oratory. The title of such a saint is neither Rabbi,
nor Doctor, nor Professor, nor even Dean or Pres-
ident, but as our sages tell us, he is called friend,
beloved, lover of God and lover of mankind. "The
Torah," whose secrets are revealed unto him, "clothes
him with meekness and reverence. He becomes

44 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

modest, long suffering and forgiving, and it makes
him great and exalts him above all things." This
was the ideal scholar and saint of the old Rabbinic
times, and he will certainly never appear on our
globe again, as long as we do not alter the standard
of greatness, and make room for him in the economy
of our higher religious institutions.

In one of his philosophical works Maimonides
declared that he would feel no compunction in being
useful to one wise man at the risk of injuring ten
thousand fools. Such a division of humanity is rather
invidious, considering the largeness of the dividend
and the smallness of the divisor, but I think that none
of us will hesitate to employ the best means that may
be helpful toward the producing of a single saint at
the risk of inconveniencing crowds of theological
skyscrapers and ecclesiastical office seekers.

Another condition for producing greatness is that
the teaching in our seminaries should be wide and
comprehensive, containing within itself the elements
of eternity and catholicity. I will explain myself:
Among the various legends attaching to the account
of the revelation on Mount Sinai there is one to the
effect that this glorious act was not only witnessed
by the master of the prophets and his contempo-
raries, but also by those who departed from these
regions long since and who came to life again for that
blissful moment, as well as by the souls of those who
were still to be born. "For," the Rabbis proceed
to say, "was it not said by Moses, 'Neither with you
only do I make this covenant and this oath, but with
him that standeth here with us this day before the

THE SEMINARY AS A WITNESS 45

Lord our God, and also with him that is not here and
with us this day.' ' The underlying idea is that a
religious manifestation, to be truly great and inspir-
ing, must also have regard for those who are not there.
It must include both an appeal to the past, to which
it should give back life and continuity, and hold out
a good message to the future, which would, in its
turn, endow it with immortality. It is true that it
is the present and its needs which have the first
claims upon our attention, and I would be sorry in-
deed to see the Jewish ministry proof against the
demands of our own times. What attracted me many
years ago to Krochmal's famous work was the title,
The Guide of the Perplexed of the Times, thereby
showing that every time has its own perplexities and
therefore is in need of its own guidance ; but it is also
from this immortal work and other kindred works
from which I have learned that unless it is a present
which forms a link between two eternities, repre-
senting an answer of Amen to the past and an Open-
ing Prayer to the future, it will be a very petty
present indeed, while its so-called needs will often
turn but to be a mere caprice of the mob, or a whim
of fashion, or the hobby of some wilful individual,
sure to disappear when viewed sub specie aeternitatis.

Perhaps I may be permitted to read here with
relation to such needs the following passage from a
book existing only in proof. After showing that
Judaism has the same powers of adaptability as
any other religion, the author proceeds to say:

"It must, however, be remarked that this satis-
fying the needs of anybody and everybody, of every

46 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

moment and every fleeting season, is not the highest
ideal which Judaism set before itself. Altogether I
venture to think," our author says, "that the now
fashionable test of determining the worth of religion
by its capability to supply the various demands of
the great market of believers has something low and
mercenary about it. Nothing less than a good old
honest heathen Pantheon, with beautiful gods, jovial
gods, lusty gods, ailing gods, fighting gods, intoxi-
cated gods, male gods and female gods — nothing less
than this would satisfy the crazes and imaginary
cravings of our pampered humanity, with its pagan
reminiscences, its metaphysical confusion of lan-
guages, its aesthetic pretensions, and its theological
idiosyncracies. No! True religion is above all these
silly demands. It is not a jack-of -all- trades, meaning
Monotheism to the philosopher, Pluralism to the
crowd, some mysterious Nothing to the agnostic,
Pantheism to the poet, and Service of Man to the
Hero worshipper. Its mission is just as much to
teach the world that there are false gods and false
ideals as to bring it nearer to the true one. It means
to convert the world, not to convert itself. It dis-
dains a victory by defeating itself, in giving up its
essential doctrines, its most sacred symbols, its most
precious traditions and its most vital teaching. It
has confidence in the world; it hopes and prays and
waits patiently for the Great Day when the world
will be ripe for its acceptance."

And least of all will the instruction suited to the
needs of such an isolated and detached present ever
embody any features of greatness. "Had Dante's

THE SEMINARY AS A WITNESS 47

scope," says a great critic, "been narrowed to con-
temporary Italy, the 'Divine Comedy' would have
been a picture book merely." Picture books are very
pleasant, and useful enough for babies and grown up
children, but certainly not great.

With the Bible in particular it is this feature of
eternity which is so striking even to the imagination
of those whom nobody will ever suspect of any
dogmatic bias or prejudice in favor of any particular
creed. Listen only to the following passage taken
from a book of Sir James G. Frazer, the famous
editor of Pausanias, and the not less famous author
of the Golden Bough. It reads thus:

"Apart from all questions of its religious and
historical import, which do not here concern us, the
Bible is an epic, if not a history, of the world; or, to
change the metaphor, it unrolls a vast panorama in
which the ages of the world move before us in a long
train of solemn imagery, from the creation of the
earth and the heavens onward to the final passing
away of all this material universe, and the coming of
a new heaven and a new earth wherein shall dwell
righteousness. Against this gorgeous background,
this ever shifting scenery, now bright with the hues
of heaven, now lurid with the glare of hell, we see
mankind strutting and playing their little part on
the stage of history. We see them taken from the
dust and returning to the dust; we see the rise and
fall of empires; we see great cities, now the hive of
busy multitudes, now silent and desolate, a den of
wild beasts. All life's fever is there — its loves and
hopes and joys, its high endeavors, its suffering and

48 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

sin and sorrow. And then, last scene of all, we see
the Great White Throne and the endless multitude
gathered before it; we hear the final doom pro-
nounced; and as the curtain falls, we catch a glimpse
of the fires of hell and the glories of heaven — a vision
of the world (how different from this!) where care
and sin and sorrow shall be no more, where the saints
shall rest from their labors, and where God Himself
shall wipe away all tears from their eyes."

Nor must the teaching in the Seminary be over-
much burdened with the considerations of locality.
The Directors of this institution, by terming it the
"Jewish Theological Seminary of America," have
distinctly shown their intention of avoiding sec-
tarianism; for it is an especial American feature that
no preference is given to any denomination or sect
or theological Richtung. They are all alike welcome,
each working out its salvation in its own fashion.
Again, if there is a feature in American religious life
more prominent than any other, it is its conservative
tendency. The history of the United States does
not begin with the Red Indian, and the genesis of
its spiritual life is not to be traced back to the vagaries
of some peculiar sects. This country is, as everybody
knows, a creation of the Bible, particularly the Old
Testament, and the Bible is still holding its own,
exercising enormous influence as a real spiritual
power, in spite of all the destructive tendencies,
mostly of foreign make. Nay, it is this very excess
of zeal and the over-realization of the presence of
Biblical times which unfortunately enabled quacks
to create new Tabernacles here, with new Zions

THE SEMINARY AS A WITNESS 49

and Jerusalems, and to proclaim themselves as second
or first Moseses, and even to profit their followers
with ' caricature revelations. But these are only the
excesses. The large bulk of the real American people
have, in matters of religion, retained their sobriety
and loyal adherence to the Scriptures, as their Puritan
forefathers did. America thus stands both for wide-
ness of scope and for conservatism. But be this as
it may, forget not that this is a Jewish Theological
Seminary, having the mission to teach the doctrines
and the literature of the religion which is as old as
history itself and as wide as the world. Any at-
tempt to confine its activity to the borders of a single
country, even be it as large as America, will only
make its teachings provincial, narrow and unprofit-
able. Israel, and Israel alone, must be the end for
which synagogues and seminaries are erected, even
in this country. Thus teaches the Book of Maccabees:
"God did not choose His people (Israel) for the sake
of the place (that is, His Temple), but the place for
the sake of the people."

I am not an opponent of state rights, and much
less of the rights of a whole continent, and I readily
concede that the Seminary should always give due
consideration to the religious needs of this country.
For instance, I am of opinion that we should in this
country, with its peculiar theological atmosphere,
pay more attention to Bible and theology than we did
in Europe. I am further of opinion that in a demo-
cratic country like this, everything should be avoided
in the teaching of theological institutions which is
calculated to emphasize the difference between

50 SEMI N A RY A DDRESSES

layman and Rabbi. I am also inclined to think that
any attempt towards the centralization of the spirit-
ual power into the hands of a man or a body of men
will only prove injurious to this country, with its
free and broad spirit. But these, and many other
questions like these, of a disciplinary nature, are of
minor importance. The great body of Jewish doc-
trine and Jewish law as taught by Catholic Israel
has nothing in it to collide with the American spirit,
and the Seminary to be really great will have to be
catholic, and of a uniting nature.

There is an old Jewish prayer reading thus: "Oh,
God, protect me against the day when one part (of
my body) will become a burden to the other." Un-
fortunately, there are symptoms that this day is not
far. There is even a tendency noticeable not only to
hasten this day, but at last to drop the burden and
to give up all notion of solidarity and of mutual
responsibility. There is no other way to save us
from such a calamity but to strengthen our loyalty
to the Torah and to devote ourselves to its study.

Lord John Morley, in his essay on Emerson, re-
lates that while the New England mystic was lecturing,
one of the audience asked his neighbor: "Can you
tell me what connection there is between that last
sentence and the one that went before, and what
connection it all has with Plato?" "None, my
friend, save in God!" If I were asked what connec-
tion is there, say, in order to except present company,
between Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, of Cordova
(known as Maimonides), and Solomon ben Isaac,
of Troyes (known as Rashi), I would say, "None,

THE SEMINARY AS A WITNESS 51

save in God and His Torah." The one lived under a
Mohammedan government; the other under a Chris-
tian government. The one spoke Arabic; the other
French. The one had all the advantage of an Eastern
civilization, the other lived in the barbaric West.
The one was a merchant, afterwards a famous
physician in the great capitals of Cordova and Cairo;
the other was a Rabbi, without salary, in an unim-
portant provincial city. The one was a persona
grata for many years of his life at the court of Saladin,
"the most enlightened despot who ever sat on a
throne;" the other probably never had the good, or
rather the bad fortune, of ever speaking even to the
chief constable of his place. The one was a thorough
Aristotelian and possessed of all the culture of his
day; the other was an exclusively Rabbinic scholar
and hardly knew the name of Aristotle. The one
was all system and method, writing everything in
a smooth, elegant style; the other belonged to the
great inarticulates, and wrote very little beyond
commentaries and "occasional notes." But as they
both observed the same fasts and feasts; as they
both revered the same sacred symbols, though they
put different interpretations on them; as they both
prayed in the same language — Hebrew; as they both
were devoted students of the same Torah, though
they often differed in its explanation; as they both
looked back to Israel's past with admiration and
reverence, though Maimonides' conception of the
Revelation, for instance, largely varied from that of
Rashi; as their ultimate hopes centred in the same
redemption — in one word, as they studied the Torah

52 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

and lived in accordance with its laws, and both made
the hopes of the Jewish nation their own, the bonds
of unity were strong enough even to survive the
misunderstandings between their respective followers.
And they both became the rocks and pillars of
Judaism; and a Leopold Zunz, or an Isaac Hirsch
Weiss, of Vienna, were able to appreciate both Rashi
and Maimonides, and to fall in love with both of
them. It is only by strengthening these bonds of
unity, by appreciating everything Jewish and falling
in love with it, that this great monument presented
to us and to Judaism by our noble donor, whom one
dares not thank but in oblique sentences, will become
a blessing and a prayer, and, like the trans- Jordanic
altar of the Book of Joshua, it will stand not only
for unity and brotherhood, but like that, it will also
be called witness, "for it shall be a witness between
us that the Lord is God!"

SPIRITUAL HONEYMOONS.*

IN THE days of yore, when Babylon formed the
centre of Jewish civilization, and the eyes of the
whole of Israel were turned toward the banks of the
Euphrates and the Tigris for instruction and enlight-
enment, they had the goodly custom to meet twice a
year in religious convention; once at the end of the
winter, and again at the end of the summer. These
conventions, which usually met at the great seats of
learning, Sura and Pumbedita, were honored with the
presence of the heads of the Academies, the chiefs of
the Colleges, the Princes of the Captivity, and the
Judges of the Gate. These men of light and leading,
they and their disciples, and the disciples of their
disciples, all flocked there with the purpose of fighting
out the "Battle of the Torah," until every obscurity
was made clear, and every law was fixed, "citing
proof from the Bible, the Mishnah, and the Talmud,"
thus removing every stumbling-block from the path
of Israel. The session extended over a whole month,
and the days on which they met were called the "Days
of the Kallah." The term is rather obscure, but we
shall not go far wrong if, with some scholars, we render
it the "Days of the Bride," thus implying the mystical
conception of man's communion with God, in which
the Torah figures as the bride, and the act of Revela-
tion as wedding heaven to earth. These conventions

*Address delivered at the Biennial Meeting of the Jewish Theo-
logical Seminary of America, March 20, 1904.

54 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

were then considered as a sort of spiritual honey-
moon. Court was paid to the Torah, and fresh
declarations of love and devotion and loyalty were
made to her.

But times have changed and we have changed with
the times. We have grown too old and too sober for
semi-annual honeymoons. Life is too strenuous, and
the demands upon the time of our communal workers
are too great to allow any hope of such protracted
meetings of a month's duration. We must, therefore,
be satisfied with biennial conventions, and it gives me
much pleasure to welcome you here, in the Jewish
Theological Seminary of America, as the President of
the Institution, and to thank you for the support you
have granted us.

At a biennial convention, held many years ago,
the late Dr. Sabato Morais, the founder of this
institution, expressed himself to the following effect:

"If my voice could but reach many a wealthy man
in the city of New York, I would picture to them
ancestral Judaism in the act of imploring that it may
not be suffered to perish; Judaism entreating for the
means that will nurture and raise spiritual physicians,
Rabbis skilled in the art of infusing into our religious
body fresher and more vigorous powers."

The righteous are greater in their death than in
their life, and their supplications have reached not
only the wealthiest, but at the same time some of the
noblest and best among us, who hastened to come to
the relief of this institution, and established it on a
firm basis. It is no exaggeration to say that no Jewish
seminary, either in this country or abroad, can lay

SPIRITUAL HONEYMOONS 55

claim to be better equipped than we are. Our
Seminary is located in a building most suitable for
its purpose; it commands a staff of teachers, the
majority of whom may be called thorough specialists
in their subjects; it has a large number of pupils;
it is in possession of a library, collected and donated
by Judge Sulzberger with the best of judgment and
with the greatest of sacrifices, such as no other
seminary in the world can show. Writing lately on
certain Halachic portions of the Sifre, very com-
plicated and hard to understand, I had the satis-
faction to find in the Judge's collection not less than
five commentaries on the book mentioned, greatly
helping me to clear up a very obscure subject; whilst
till now, when under similar difficulties, I could only
appeal to one commentary at my disposal. This is
a fact which every one of us will appreciate at once.

I have spoken of the "Battles of the Torah" that
were waged in the ancient semi-annual conventions.
The shortness of our meeting does not allow me to
invite you to join here in these battles. They must
be fought out by the Faculty and the students — I
hope not between the Faculty and the students — but
you will be interested to learn that we still adhere to
the old custom of "citing proof from the Bible, and
the Mishnah and the Talmud." These in all their
ramifications are the subjects which are taught here.

Bible occupies a prominent place in our curriculum,
and I am happy to say that it is taught by a man of
a thorough university training, who occupied the
position of Privatdocent in one of the great German
universities. The subject is thus taught in agreement

56 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

with the best critical methods. Provision has also
been made for a course of lectures introductory to
the Bible, in which the views about the rise and
development of the canon, both of the ancient and of
the modern schools, will be expounded to the classes.
Our reason for deferring this course of lectures to a
later stage in the schedule is that we find it advisable
that our pupils should first know something of the
Bible before they learn everything about the Bible.
But I must tell you distinctly that with all the
allowance we are making for Bible criticism and
modern requirement, we are not prepared to recon-
struct the Bible in accordance with every whim of the
latest commentator. If I have any hope for myself
and for those who are to be trained in this institu-
tion, it is that the Bible will reconstruct us.

When a certain student approached Maimonides
some eight hundred years ago with a rather difficult
question, relating to the fall of man as narrated in the
third chapter of Genesis, the beginning of Maimon-
ides' answer was: "You appear to have studied the
matter superficially, and imagine that you can under-
stand a book which has been the guide of past and
present generations, when you for a moment with-
draw from your lusts and appetites, and glance over
its contents as if you were reading a story or some
poetical composition. Collect your thoughts and
examine the matter carefully, for it is not to be under-
stood as you first thought, but as you will find after
due deliberation." In this blessed century of ours,
when men who have hardly mastered the vocabulary
of the Hebrew language parade as infallible critics,

SPIRITUAL HONEYMOONS 57

I can only add to Maimonides' advice: Learn a
little more Hebrew, study a little more the text and
less commentaries and introductions, make yourself
thoroughly acquainted with its idioms and the methods
of composition in ancient Israel, and you will find
"after due deliberation that the matter is not to be
understood as you first thought."

The same critical methods are pursued in our
teaching of Rabbinic literature, which, besides the
Talmud Babli, also includes the Talmud of Jerusalem
and the ancient Tannaitic Midrashim, as the Torat
Kohanim, the Mechilta, the Sifre, and the other
ancient Rabbinic collections, without which a scien-
tific study of the old Rabbinic literature is impossible.

On a closer examination of these works you will
find that large portions of them consist of Halachah.
The term Halachah is variously translated. Those
who have never given a thought to it render it
casuistry, and are proud of their ignorance; whilst
to those who have studied it, the Halachah repre-
sents the legal portion of Jewish literature accompan-
ied by argument, and they endeavor to increase their
knowledge of it. Now, there was a good deal of
comment lately in the press as to the advisability
of the study of the Halachah for the Occidental man,
and I owe you some explanation for our alloting so
much time to it. But can any one tell men exactly
where the Occidental man is to be found? I read in
a paper the other day that it is only Kansas which
can lay claim to pure Occidentalism, and that Chicago
itself is Orientalized. If it is a matter of geography,
I think that the State of Washington or the Ter-

58 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

ritory of Alaska are the only regions which can claim
this honor; but if it is a question of intellect and learn-
ing, I will mention the great Occidental man who died
lately, considered the greatest historian, and known
on both sides of the Atlantic. I refer to Professor
Mommsen. It was this Mommsen who wrote the
famous history of the Roman Empire, but at the same
time published many volumes on the jurisprudence
of the Romans, and as many volumes again on in-
scriptions dating from antiquity. To mention another
Occidental man, I will name Gibbon, the greatest
historian the English race has ever produced, whose
work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, has
passed through the furnace of nineteenth century
criticism without becoming antiquated; but a full
account of the Halachah of the Romans is incorpor-
ated in his great history, as may be seen from the
forty-fourth chapter of his work, which passes as
one of the best digests of the Roman law. As to our
constitutional historians, they do not draw all their
knowledge of your past from the prayers which
traveling ministers deliver on occasion at Congress,
or from the addresses of Congressional chaplains.
As far as I know, their statements are largely based
on the study of the English codes, your own collec-
tion of Revised Statutes and the decisions of the
Supreme Court. Of Jewish historians, I will mention
here Leopold Herzfeld, whose Geschichte des Volkes
Jisrael von Vollendung des Zweiten Tempels bis zur
Einsetzung des Mackabaers Schimon forms the most
critical and most thorough piece of history ever
written by a Jew. He was one of our best Halachists,

SPIRITUAL HONEYMOONS 59

and his work is especially distinguished by the pains-
taking care with which the author studied the legal
portions of Rabbinic literature, and the scientific
method in which he utilized them.

As every one knows who has occupied himself
with the study of Jewish history, the greatest defects
of many works in this field are due to the fact that
their authors were largely ignorant of the Halachah
and lacking in a real appreciation of Jewish mys-
ticism. They have thus missed the central springs
both of Jewish reason and of Jewish emotion.

I by no means entertain the hope that all our
Rabbis will develop into Mommsens or even Herz-
felds, but I consider it important for the honor of
America, and of American Israel in particular, that
our institutions of learning should be conducted on
such lines as not to exclude all possibility of present-
ing the world one day with a great scholar and a
deep thinker.

In addition to these subjects, we have also regular
lectures on Jewish history, Jewish theology, Jewish
philosophy, Jewish archaeology and Jewish liturgy.
Hellenistic literature and the Apocryphal Books have
also their share. We also insist that the student who
comes to us should be in possession of a B. A. degree
or some equivalent to it, bearing evidence to his class-
ical training. We consider this as most essential for
the equipment of a Rabbi. The Rabbi should be
"the greatest of his brethren," and there must be no
department of human thought in which he should
stand as inferior to any member of his congregation
who has enjoyed a liberal education. But apart from

60 SEMI N A RY A D DRESSES

this consideration, I am certain that such a training
will prove most helpful to develop the conservative
tendencies of our young men and will give them that
gravity, without which the public speaker becomes
a mere windbag and ranter. We should never have
witnessed these wild excesses in our pulpits and
platforms, had our orators, who talk so much of
individuality and individualism, gone through a
proper course of Greek and Latin classics. They
would have had a better understanding of what
humanity now owes to antiquity and to its past,
and would have been less confident of their power to
turn the wheel of history. Of course, Greek and Latin
are no guarantee against skepticism, but my experi-
ence has been that what the thoroughly educated
man doubted first and last was his own infallibility.
We consider it also important that the R.abbi should
have a wide acquaintance with the masterpieces of
English literature, both in prose and verse. Their
study will give a chasteness to the style of the student,
and make him the enemy of all forms of blatant
superficiality. He will learn from them that thor-
oughness is a part of excellence, and that self-com-
placency is the companion of ignorance. More
than this, he will come to feel a wholesome diffidence
as to his own knowledge and his own powers, and will
regard only the most mature thought and careful
presentation as becoming his office and as worthy
of acceptance.

You will say probably that this is rather an
elaborate process for training ministers. I admit it.
But don't forget the age of elixirs and universal

SPIRITUAL HONEYMOONS 61

remedies has passed away. There was a time when
the "blessed" words, "Israel's Mission," "Evolution,"
and "Progress" were powerful enough to make the
fortunes of a preacher for the whole of his life if he
possessed the necessary shouting organs to give them
sufficient emphasis and accentuation. Alas! Times
have changed, and these universal remedies have lost
their virtue with us. Serious-minded men suddenly
made the discovery that the missionaries came so
close to being converted themselves that it was al-
most impossible to discern between the teacher and
those who were meant to become the novices. Again,
some of those who know best the meaning of the word
"Evolution" doubt greatly its applicability to ethics
and to matters spiritual. Personally, when I hear
how some of our youngsters solemnly declare to their
congregations that the modern minister is a three-
fold being, composed of Rabbi, preacher and prophet,
and that he may choose soon to reveal himself in this
last capacity — I say, when I hear such announcements
and think of Israel's great seers in bygone times —
I can only wish that the process of evolution might
have stopped at Isaiah and Habbakuk. As to
"Progress," the question is where shall we progress?
When one, in his forward movements, has reached
an abyss where one step more would mean death and
ruin, he will instinctively shrink back and retrace
his steps. The only difference is that those who pos-
sess the moral courage, turn their faces from the
abyss and walk in the direction from which they have
started; whilst the others, like the dead in the myth,
unable to avert their eyes from the place of their

62 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

former attractions, walk backwards. But back they
go all the same, in spite of all their professions of
"Progress." Judaism cannot be dismissed with a few
general meaningless phrases. Judaism is, as I have
often insisted upon, and shall insist upon again on
every public occasion, a positive religion, with a
Sacred Writ and a continuous tradition. It is a
discipline of life and has a philosophy of its own. It
has distinct precepts, and usages, and customs,
consecrated by the consent of Catholic Israel through
thousands of years, and hallowed by the agony and
the tears of the martyrs. It has a wide literature
running through all historic ages, with numberless
junctions branching off into every department of
human thought. It has one of the most ancient
liturgies of the world, of constant growth and develop-
ment, but still remaining intact in its main features.
The knowledge of such a religion can be acquired only
by serious study and elaborate training, which must
necessarily last for years.

But there is also another point which I should like
to submit to your consideration, and in which your
co-operation is urgently needed. Oliver Wendell
Holmes once remarked:

"These United States furnish the greatest market
for intellectual green fruit of all the places in the
world. The demand for intellectual labor is so enor-
mous and the market so far from nice that young
talent is apt to fare like un-ipe gooseberries — get
plucked to make a fool of."

We are trying our best to improve the market and
to make it "nice." But it is also necessary that you

SPIRITUAL HONEYMOONS 63

on your part should be more careful in your demand ;
that you should allow young talent to ripen. This is
not merely a question of finances, but it is a question
of raising the standard of the qualification of the
ministry altogether. Study requires ripening, and the
problems of Judaism are not such that a young man of
twenty might master them, even if he were a genius.
All our labors will be in vain as long as those who
have hardly begun to learn are burdened with the
office of teaching. The pioneer season, with its partial
savagery, its unrest, its haste, and its adventurous
character, has given way to settled, solid and method-
ical habits of life, and it is high time that the Syna-
gogue should come to its rights, and be dealt with in
the same careful and solemn manner as is accorded to
all other higher interests of the community. It is
only then that Judaism will be able to re-discover it-
self, and to accomplish those sacred duties for which
our ancestors died, and for which we hope to live.

REBELLION AGAINST BEING A PROBLEM.*

OF ALL the various banquets and receptions given
in honor of great men which it has ever been my
privilege to attend, none has afforded me more
gratification than the opportunity offered to me of
being present at this dinner, given in honor of our
revered guest, Monsieur Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu,
Member of the Institute of France. For thus said
Rabbi Abin, who apparently plagiarized Carlyle
some fifteen centuries before the Scotch seer wrote
his ''Heroes and Hero Worship:" "He who sits at
the festive board at which the true sage and scholar
is entertained, enjoys a foretaste of that bliss which
man experiences by direct communion with the
Divine." It is in such moments of grace that genius
relaxes into geniality, and elaborate learning expands
into wit and esprit, and deep thought takes the shape
of that delightful and profitable proverbial wisdom
which has created our "table-talk literature," and
of which the speeches just delivered have given you
such a fine specimen.

The sense of gratification is increased by the feeling
of gratitude which we all harbor towards the author
of Israel Among the Nations. As a native of Rou-
mania, I feel under an especial debt of gratitude
towards our distinguished guest. The troubles of the
Roumanian Jew begin with perceiving the light of

*Address delivered at Banquet in honor of the late Anatole
Leroy-Beaulieu, May 16, 1904.

66 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

the world. On the very day on which he receives his
name, by which he is called up to the Torah in later
life, he loses his civil and political rights, and becomes
subject to all sorts of restrictive laws. On the oc-
casion of my first fight with the boys of our Christian
neighbors, I was warned not to hit back, as such a
presumption on my part may bring serious misfortune
upon the whole of the Jewish community. On
remonstrating that it is unfair that the Christian
boys should enjoy all immunity in their fights, I was
given to understand that we belonged to a people
which is under the curse of being a problem, and that
I must wait for an answer until the Jewish problem
has found its proper solution. Naturally, I rebelled
against being a problem, and I pondered a great deal
over its meaning. I was perhaps a boy of twelve
or fourteen when there fell into my hands a Hebrew
translation of Josephus' Contra Apion, which I read
with great interest, though it was only partially
understood by me, and I well remember that I won-
dered whether our Christian neighbors had ever read
"Apion," and whether this might not be the cause of
their ill-will against us. I must say to their honor
that they were not addicted to the reading of books,
and that they were quite original in their hatred and
Jew-baiting, but those were still the days when
French influence was predominant on the shores of
the Danube. When matters assumed dangerous
proportions, there used to come messages from the
West, echoing the voice of God and humanity as
revealed unto His servants who inaugurated the
French Revolution, which made our neighbors under-

REBELLION AGAINST BEING A PROBLEM 67

stand that there is still a Providence in the world
watching even over the destiny of the Jew.

With the year 1870, the reign of blood and iron
began. Humanity was gradually deposed. A new
generation arose which knew not the traditions of
the French Revolution and the "fifth-beast of Daniel"
was let loose. Hatred and malice and envy and bru-
tality of the worst kind were set free against a de-
fenseless people. But what was worse, was that all
these brutal instincts, till then held at bay by reason
of public opinion, were raised to the dignity of an
"ism," and the term "Anti-Semitism" was invented.
The Jewish problem became more complicated
every day, and a large literature was created. In-
stead of being a mere religious problem, we suddenly
discovered ourselves to be also an ethnological prob-
lem, an economic problem, a social problem, a psycho-
logical problem, and ever so many more problems.
I need hardly describe to you under what torture
the Jew is when wading through this degraded and
degrading literature. It is actual vivisection, without
the relief of anaesthetics. Some Mohammedan theo-
logians are said to have seriously discussed whether
women have a soul. These anti-Semitic scribblers
took it for granted that we have no soul, no sense
of honor, no feelings of dignity, and were quite
astonished when we showed signs of resentment.

You may then realize what a relief it was to come
upon the work Israel Among the Nations. It is a
noble book. It is written in a thoroughly scientific
spirit. It is not the Jew who constitutes the problem
for the author. It is rather the phenomenon that the

68 SEMI N A RY A D DRESSES

Jew was made to constitute a problem in the nine-
teenth century. Just as a scientific investigator
examines into the causes of an epidemic, our author
subjects to an analysis the symptoms of the spiritual
malady that has afflicted humanity. Jew and
Christian alike are arraigned before his tribunal.
The Jews do not escape censure. Indeed we are
not faultless. We raise no claim to perfection. But
one always has the feeling that "those are the wounds
inflicted by a friend." In Jewish angelology, the
Angel Michael figures as "An Angel of Letters,"
or as they expressed it, the Prince of Wisdom, but
he is described at the same time as the friend and the
advocate of Israel. The savant Leroy-Beaulieu is
a great man of letters in the best and the widest
sense of the word, but what he accomplished as an
advocate of Israel, he has shown in the book just
named. He not only attempts to reconcile us with
the rest of the world, but also with ourselves, or with
that section of the Jewish community which forms
our particular problem. It is a Prince of Wisdom
who offers us this wise counsel with regards to
our problem:

"Some of the Jewish emigrants," he says, "have
been obviously degraded and corrupted by centuries
of oppression. Many years — perhaps one or two
generations — will be needed to raise their moral
plane, to imbue them with a sense of honor and
dignity. It is a great mistake to believe that this
moral uplifting can be facilitated by detaching them
from their religion. On the contrary, the least praise-
worthy Jews that I have met have generally been

REBELLION AGAINST BEING A PROBLEM 69

'de-judaised' Jews, those who had ceased to observe
the Mosaic law."

As a student of Jewish literature, it was only
natural that I should be eager to learn the opinion of
this great man of letters on the various productions
of Jewish genius. An after-dinner speech is not a
fit occasion to enter into a learned discourse. But
one general remark will not be out of place. My
perusal of Israel Among the Nations impressed me
as if M. Leroy-Beaulieu, who is himself a pious
Christian, feels some anxiety about the fate of the
Old Testament, under these attacks by the "higher"
and "lower" anti-Semitism. To his comfort, and to
the comfort of all gathered here, let me say that I
am very hopeful in this respect. Perhaps I may
reproduce here the following story from the Reverend
Edward Everett Hale's book, "Lowell and His
Friends:"

"I am not sure," our late Senatorial Chaplain
says, "that this story of those days is quite decorous
enough for print. But I will risk it. Professor
Calvin Ellis Stowe, who was a classmate of Long-
fellow's, told me that in the early days of '61, he met
Longfellow in the streets of Boston. Both of them
were in haste, but Longfellow had time enough to
ask if the Andover gentlemen were all alive to their
duty to the nation. Stowe said he thought they
were, and Longfellow said, 'If the New Testament
won't do, you must give them the Old/ '

This is not said in disparagement of the New
Testament. All that I desire to suggest is that the
Old Testament is an elemental force of morality which

70 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

humanity may neglect for a while, but with which it
cannot dispense for any length of time. We shall
never cease to profit by the Old Testament as long as
there exists a sense of duty, and we shall return to it
whenever the need of the Divine Imperative will be
felt deepest. As to the later developments of Hebrew
literature, we must not forget that very little is
known of it. We must recollect that the knowledge of
Post-Biblical Hebrew literature is still in its infancy.
The magnificent work Les Rabbins Francais, which
we owe to the French nation, has revealed only a
small part of it. Jewish literature is eminently a
religious literature with a Golden Legend of its own,
and a continuous record of the experience and strug-
gles of beautiful souls. But unfortunately most of
these litterateurs who have made it their main occu-
pation in life to acquaint the world with this literature
and the men who have created it, have not yet out-
grown their rationalistic stage. Being mainly devoted
to what I may call a bourgeois gospel or a bourgeois
Torah and a Philistine conception of the universe,
they were lacking in sympathy and depth of religious
feeling, and devoid of all appreciation of mysticism
and those qualities which make for saintliness and
holiness. What I always admired in Renan was not
so much his Life of Jesus, which is, indeed, largely
antiquated now, or his History of the People of Israel,
in which one, after having studied the works of
Graf, Wellhausen, Kuenen, Stade and other "fathers
of the holy church of higher criticism," finds little
that is entirely new and original — what I admired
most in him was his essay on Francis of Assisi, where

REBELLION AGAINST BEING A PROBLEM 71

he showed himself a master in the art of religion,
and proved that his liberal tendencies have not ob-
scured his judgment upon saints and saintliness,
though he saw the weak points both in their character
and in their logic. We have the saints, but we are
still lacking in Renans.

Another hint offered us for our guidance by our
learned author is contained in the following passage.
After paying us the compliment that we are a ' 'pro-
phetic people," M. Leroy-Beaulieu says, "Were the
Jew and the Christian equally faithful — the one to
the Gospel and the other to the Torah — the points
of difference between them would be fewer than those
of resemblance." These are fair stipulations to which
all, both Jews and Christians, could subscribe with a
good conscience, and it is for a reconciliation on such
terms of loyalty to our pasts and devotion to our
religions that peace is desirable. An American writer,
whose name escapes me, records the following pleas-
antry from Colonial times.

"A youth among the Friends wished to espouse a
fair Puritan maiden ; but the Quakers disapproved his
marrying out of their society, and the Congrega-
tionalists his marrying into theirs; so in despair he
thus addressed her: 'Ruth, let us break from this
unreasonable bondage. I will give up my religion,
and thou shalt give up thine; and we will marry and
go into the Church of England, and go to the devil
together!"

I hope that both Ruth and her sweetheart are in
some parlor in Heaven. There are many mansions
in the House of our Father, but I tell you frankly

72 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

that I desire no bond of unity on the condition of
our going to the devil, either Jew or Christian. The
terms of M. Leroy-Beaulieu are such that we all go
to Heaven, where we shall meet him. But there is
no hurry for such a meeting. This can wait "bis
ueber hundert und zwanzig jahr, zu gesund," as the
Jewish expression is — and so let us all raise our glasses
and drink to the happiness of the author of "ISRAEL
AMONG THE NATIONS."

THE RECONCILIATION OF ISRAEL.*

THE occasion for which we have gathered today
in these academic precincts, is a most solemn
one. It forms an epoch both in the history of the
reorganized Seminary, and in the life of those to
whom I have just handed these Rabbinical diplomas.
Two years are a short period — indeed too short — in
the history of an institution. But it must be pointed
out that the gentlemen who graduated today had
pursued their theological studies under the guidance
of competent teachers before the reorganization of
the Seminary took place, some here, and some else-
where, and it is only in view of this fact that my
colleagues and myself felt able to grant them these
diplomas. But we may say with the Scriptures,
"God has done graciously with me, for I have all —
all of which an Institution of learning could wish
for: a splendid building, a great library, an excellent
teaching staff, and largely attended classes." We
had in these two years experience enough to justify
us in the policy which the Seminary has pursued
from its very beginning; and that is, that its mission
is to stand for Jewish life and Jewish thought. I
have so often enlarged upon the meaning of these
two terms that it is not necessary to enter into any
comment upon them. In my Inaugural Address I
have explained the meaning of these terms, and I

*Address delivered at the first Graduating Exercises of the
Jewish Theological Seminary of America, June 5, 1904.

74 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

shall not dwell upon them to-day. I may remark,
however, that our experiment to confine the teaching
in the Seminary to post-graduates, that is, men who
have taken their B. A. degree, did not prove such a
failure as some prophesied. It is true, that not a
week, I may say, has passed in the life of this Seminary
in which I was not compelled to refuse admission to
applicants unable to comply with our entrance re-
quirements. But there is no help for this. We must
insist that our institution be conducted on a scien-
tific basis. There is no way of training men in any
department of scholarship conducted in a scientific
and methodical way without preliminary preparation
afforded by such studies as are commonly included
under the term of "a liberal education."

It is only by proceeding on the lines mapped out
for us by Zunz, Krochmal, Rappaport, Frankel, and
others, that traditional Judaism, built up on the
broad basis of science and history, can ever hope to
become a force and to bring about that reconciliation
among the parties to which every well-wisher of
Israel is looking forward.

We consider it also important that the Rabbi
should have a wide acquaintance with the master-
pieces of English literature, both in prose and in
verse. This is the only means of understanding and
making ourselves understood by our fellow-country-
men. And the Rabbi, as a representative of the com-
munity, should always prove the best means of bring-
ing about this mutual understanding.

This brings me to the real subject of my address
to-day, which is to give a few words of advice to those

THE RECONCILIATION OF ISRAEL 75

who are about to enter upon their sacred callings as
Rabbis in Jewish communities. It is recorded in
ancient Jewish literature that when the congregation
delegated the man to step before the Ark and to
perform the service, they did not say unto him,
"Come and pray," but, "Deliver our battles; ac-
complish our reconciliation." Delivering battles and
accomplishing reconciliation was the mission of the
spiritual representatives of Israel in olden times, and
this should be your mission, my friends, when you
step before the Ark. That "Life means War," is an
old adage, but you find the spiritual life to be no less
so. In your capacity as pastors you will have to wage
war against many an evil, rampant in large cities,
the battles against which should be inspired by the
words of the minister. I say "inspired" advisedly,
as I do not think it altogether fitting that the Rabbi
should engage in the office of the public agitator or
moral detective. "You cannot," it is an old saying,
"perform the part of the broom without getting
soiled at the same time;" and the Rabbi should be
above every taint and impurity. You will have to
deliver battles against what the old Jews called the
"Mekatreg" (the Perennial Accuser), or what we would
call the savage instincts of hatred and jealousy,
which, under various disguises and under all sorts of
pretentious titles, rise against us in every generation.
Some ancient Jewish teacher maintained that Israel,
in the course of its life as a nation, has only enjoyed
one day of peace. This is indeed a bold statement.
But I may say without being guilty of exaggeration
that anybody who watched the literary productions

76 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

in the fields of history, philosophy and theology which
appeared during the last generation, will find that
there is seldom a book in which we are left entirely
at peace, and which does not contain some charge
against Israel or his religion in one shape or another.
You, as the scholars of the community, will meet
with the same experience, and it will be your duty to
defend Israel against these unjust attacks. You will
also have to hold up principles which by the very
fact of their catholic spirit and their aiming at
reconciliation may easily become the subject of attack
by extreme parties. With regard to this latter, I
in no way wish you to constitute yourselves into a
sort of Synagoga Militans, and to widen the gap
which is already deep enough to divide Israel into
regular sects. The rule of action in such cases is:
do your duty, state your principles clearly, and for
the rest, remember the Talmudical saying, 4<Silence
of a Babylonian testifies to his noble descent." This
is the only way to accomplish reconciliation.

But chief among those you will have to fight will
be your own selves. R. Bachya ben Pakudah gave
us the wise counsel: "If you want to praise, praise
God; if you want to blame, blame yourself." I am
afraid that we do not always follow this counsel.
The Midrash tells us that when Elijah said, "I have
been very jealous for the Lord of Hosts that the
children of Israel have forsaken Thy covenant,"
God said unto him, "Well, this is My covenant, not
thine." The prophet then continued to say, "They
have thrown down Thy altars, and slain Thy prophets
with the sword." Whereupon God said unto him,

THE RECONCILIATION OF ISRAEL 77

"These are My altars and My prophets: What
does it concern thee?" At last Elijah said, "And I.
even I only am left, and they seek my life to take it
away from me." The rejoinder was, "Let the mouth
which denounces Israel be crushed." Thereupon he
was removed from the office of prophecy, which was
transferred to Elishah, the son of Shaphat. Of course,
there was no tradition about this dialogue between
God and Elijah. What the Rabbis meant to convey
by this paraphrase of I Kings, 19 : 10 was, that
leaders representing spiritual institutions, great as
they may be, are but rarely free from a certain taint
of selfishness. They are thus tempted to confuse the
cause for which they stand with their own selves,
or even to place their selves above the cause. The
temptation is the greater and the easier to satisfy
among us who are still in need of an established tra-
dition and wanting in a general public opinion in
matters spiritual. Under such conditions, the leader
is sometimes apt to consider his own person as the
source of all authority, and to act on the principle,
"Le Judaisme cest moi" (I am Judaism).

My friends, beware of such a mistake, and wage
war against yourself when such temptations come
upon you. Neither you, nor I, nor even your Pres-
idents or Parnassim to come, are Judaism. It is not
your covenant, and they are not your prophets. We
are all only humble servants of Judaism. In the
narrative of Moses' first call we read, "And God
said moreover unto Moses, thus shalt thou say unto
the children of Israel: the Lord God of your fathers,
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God

78 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

of Jacob hath sent me unto you." (Exod. 3:15.)
Let this Scriptural verse serve as a test to you whether
you preach Judaism or yourselves. When your mes-
sage is not any longer addressed to the children of
Israel, or when you cannot any longer say with a
good conscience that it is the God of your fathers
who sent you — in other words, when you have arrived
at the conviction necessitating your breach with the
Past, and compelling you to confess that the Present
is only to form a preamble to a Future Universalism,
with the consequent final absorption and extinction
of the children of Israel — then be sure that you will
not accomplish our reconciliation, and that honesty
and uprightness impose silence upon you, for you
have no message any longer.

It is further indispensable that your message shall
be clear and concise. But you will never obtain
this readiness unless you follow the rule laid down
by the Rabbis, "Let thy spirit not be so overbearing
as to venture to say anything in public before thou
hast thought over the matter between thee and thy-
self three or four times." You have never given me
occasion to think that you will fail in your duty by
overbearance ; but there is sometimes a tendency
among young men to rely too much upon the spiritual
dowry they bring with them from their Alma Mater.
This is bad economy, and leads to intellectual bank-
ruptcy. To succeed in becoming life-long teachers, as
every minister is bound to be, you must agree to
become at the same time life-long learners. "How
came it about," we read in the Sifre, "that Israel
has become petty and dull-brained? Because they

THE RECONCILIATION OF ISRAEL 79

were not building up in the words of the Torah."
Universities and seminaries can only impress you with
the immensity of the task before you, and make you
feel the shortcomings of your attainments, and supply
you with the basis of your building. But as soon as
the foundations are laid, it is for you to complete
the work which the Seminary has begun. And unless
you are satisfied to remain small and mediocre — not to
use the harsher term of the Sifre — you should all your
life "be fixing seasons for the study of the Torah."
On this occasion allow me to also call your atten-
tion to another point which is very much at my heart.
You are all young men, and it may easily happen
that the one or the other among you will be elected
as an assisting or associate minister of an older
Rabbi. I have noted with sorrow that such positions
are very seldom productive of the desired happiness
to the parties concerned. The young minister,
coming fresh from college, brimful of life, and seeking
for an outlet for his energies, is, I fear, not always
inclined to treat his colleague with the consideration
due to him. He looks upon him as one who has al-
ready passed the "dead line," as the expression is,
and whose advice can be ignored without any det-
riment to the congregation. My friends, God pays
"measure for measure," and to such a one the punish-
ment will be that he will grow old one day himself
and will learn that zeal and enthusiasm are only of
value when they are balanced by experience and
sound judgment, only to be acquired by mature age
and after many a bitter disappointment. One must
never forget the injunction of the Scriptures. "Thou

80 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honor the
face of the old man , and fear thy God : I am the Lord . ' '
You all know the term "B'nai Torah," "The children
of the Torah," as applied to the students of the Law,
but you will please Mother Torah best if you treat
your older brothers with brotherly love. And now,
let me hope that you will always remain faithful child-
ren both to Mother Torah and to this Alma Mater.
If I have any further wish to express, it is that this
Alma Mater which has introduced you to Mother
Torah will maintain a permanent place in your affec-
tions, and that you will give us proofs of your devo-
tion to this institution, and loyalty to the principles
we have attempted to inculcate, as often as the
occasion may rise, and you may be sure that these
relations of devotion and loyalty will be mutual.
We shall always watch your career with interest,
and shall always be ready to be as helpful to you as
we can, and let our combined efforts be of such a
nature that we can say, "From you and me (or rather,
the institution which I have the honor to represent)
will ascend praise to the Most High."

ALTAR BUILDING IN AMERICA.*

IN THE weekly lesson read yesterday in the syna-
gogue, both Israel's hopes and Israel's fears find
supreme expression. From these chapters we will
select for our meditation today the following intro-
ductory verses from the twenty-seventh chapter of
Deuteronomy :

"1. And Moses with the elders of Israel com-
manded the people, saying, Keep all the command-
ments which I command you this day.

*********

"4. Therefore, it shall be when ye be gone over
Jordan, that ye shall set up these stones, which I
command you this day, in mount Ebal, and thou
shalt plaister them with plaister.

"5. And there shalt thou build an altar unto the
Lord thy God, an altar of stones; thou shalt not lift
up any iron tool upon them.

"6. Thou shalt build the altar of the Lord thy
God of whole stones; and thou shalt offer burnt
offerings thereon to the Lord thy God.

"7. And thou shalt offer peace offerings, and
shalt eat there, and rejoice before the Lord thy God.

"8. And thou shalt write upon the stones all the
words of this Torah very plainly." (Deut. 27:1-8.)

*Address delivered at the consecration of the reconstructed
Synagogue of Congregation Agudath Jeshurun, Indianap-
olis, Ind., and the Installation of the first graduate of
the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Rabbi Charles
I. Hoffman, August 28, 1904.

82 SEMI N A RY A DDRESSES

The building of an altar for the purpose of wor-
ship was thus a sacred duty incumbent upon Israel
the moment they had come to "the rest and the
inheritance," as the Holy Land is called in the Bible.

And Israel remained conscious of the fact of the
imperativeness of this duty throughout the whole
course of its long and checkered history. Whereso-
ever the Jew, the eternal wanderer, found rest, though
not always an inheritance, there an altar was erected,
dedicated to the worship of the Lord, the God of
Israel. Thus, as far back as a thousand years ago
when the dispersion of Israel covered a much smaller
area than at the present day, an ancient Jewish teacher
could with justice apply the Psalmist's words: "Their
line is gone out through all the earth, and their
words to the end of the world," to the synagogues
and the Houses of Interpretation in which the Law
of God was taught to the people. Our own times
where the dispersion of Israel extends to the remotest
corners of the earth, more and more vindicate the
interpretation of this sage. If the synagogues and
Houses of Interpretation were marked on the map,
they would be found as universal and world encircling
as mountain and river, everywhere lending color,
individuality and life to our globe. Verily, "From
the rising of the sun to the going down thereof, the
Lord's name is praised."

Israel in America has particularly distinguished
itself in this holy work of altar-building. The Talmud
speaks of certain commandments which Israel
received in joy, and at all times joyfully fulfilled.
Considering the comparatively short period since

ALTAR BUILDING IN AMERICA 83

this country of ours was opened to civilization, the
number of places of worship erected under these
skies by both Jew and Christian proves altar building
to be an especial and favorite duty of the American
people, received in joy from the very beginning, and
to this day joyfully continued. I have heard of a
famous Jewish scholar in Europe who in his vacation,
would retire to the most isolated nooks of the Car-
pathians or ascend the loftiest summits of the Alps,
there to perform his devotions and thus hallow a
new spot on earth to the service of Almighty God.
Similar feelings must evidently have animated the
American people in their unprecedented spiritual
annexations.

The first settlers in this country were mostly men
who had left their native land for conscience' sake,
despairing of the Old World as given over to the
powers of darkness, despotism and unbelief. And I
can quite realize how they must have gloried in the
idea of being chosen instruments of Providence who
were to restore the spiritual equilibrium of the world
by the conquest of new spheres of religious influence
and their dedication to the worship of Almighty God.

As a Jew coming from the East of Europe, where
my people are trodden down, where seats of Jewish
learning and Jewish piety are daily destroyed, I am
greatly animated by the same feelings and am com-
forted to see the New World compensating us for
our many losses in the Old. I rejoice, therefore, at
the privilege of being with you on this solemn occa-
sion. The words of the benediction, "Blessed art
Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who

84 SEMI N A RY A DDRESSES

hath kept us in life and hath preserved us and enabled
us to reach this season," rise to my lips, and with
the consent of the Omnipresent and with the consent
of this holy congregation I declare this building
"Holiness to the Lord!"

We are now prepared for the minuter considera-
tion of our text.

"And thou shalt write upon the stones all the
words of the Torah very plainly." The stones are
erected, and at this moment have been dedicated to
the service of God. But bricks and mortar, marble
pillar and gilded domes do not make an altar. What
constitutes an altar are the words of the Torah,
which are engraved on the very stones, which influence
the lives of the worshipers and convert their homes
into places of worship. The verse in Exodus 20:24,
also containing injunctions regarding the altar, is
paraphrased by the great Hillel as if God were saying
to man, "If thou wilt come unto My house, I will
come into thy house." "The word of our Lord
endureth forever." This is a divine promise. But
if after frequent visits to places of worship, you have
experienced nothing of the nearness of God in your
houses, then you may safely doubt whether you have
really been in a house of God. It is the home which
is the final and supreme test of the altar. A syna-
gogue, for instance, that teaches a Judaism which
finds no reverberating echo in the Jewish home, awak-
ens there no distinctive conscious Jewish life, has
failed in its mission, and is sure sooner or later to
disappear as a religious factor making for righteous-
ness and holiness. It may serve as a lecture hall or

ALTAR BUILDING IN AMERICA 85

a lyceum, or as a place to which people in their
ennui repair for "an intellectual treat;" but it will
never become a place of worship, a real altar for
acceptable sacrifices, bestowing that element of
joy in God, the Simhah shel mizwah of our Rabbis,
which is the secret and strength of Judaism.

This is a test applicable to all ages and to all
countries; to the New World as well as the Old.
There is nothing in American citizenship which is
incompatible with our observing the dietary laws, our
sanctifying the Sabbath, our fixing a Mezuzah on
our doorposts, our refraining from unleavened bread
on Passover, or our perpetuating any other law
essential to the preservation of Judaism. On the
other hand, it is now generally recognized by the
leading thinkers that the institutions and observ-
ances of religion are part of its nature, a fact that the
moribund rationalism of a half century ago failed to
realize. In certain parts of Europe every step in our
civil and social emancipation demanded from us a
corresponding sacrifice of a portion of the glorious
heritage bequeathed to us by our fathers. Jews in
America, thank God, are no longer haunted by such
fears. We live in a commonwealth in which by the
blessing of God and the wisdom of the Fathers of
the Constitution, each man abiding by its laws, has
the inalienable right of living in accordance with
the dictates of his own conscience. In this great,
glorious and free country we Jews need not sacrifice
a single iota of our Torah; and, in the enjoyment
of absolute equality with our fellow citizens we can

86 SEMI N A RY A DDRESSES

live to carry out those ideals for which our ancestors
so often had to die.

Another criterion of the true altar, according to
our Rabbis, is that its mission is peace, Shalom.

The main function of Shalom consists, as a great
Jewish-Spanish thinker teaches, in creating harmony
and unity in all manifestations of life, so that every
discordant note, either in action or in thought, is
made impossible. "The ways of the Torah are ways
of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace" (Shalom),
and none of these ways, traversing all the relations
of man, both to his Maker and to his fellow men,
can be neglected without injury to body and soul.
Thus a Jew, who is most particular in the fulfilment
of the ritual laws, but is less observant of the por-
tions of the Torah commonly described as ethical
and moral, is certainly a disturber of the peace of the
King of Kings, and has committed an offense for
which, as you know, Heaven has renounced the
prerogative of granting pardons, unless full redress
is first made. And his offence is the greater as the
discordant note will have a jarring effect on all the
community, causing dismay and resentment in every
quarter, for which all his co-religionists will be made
to suffer.

Shalom further implies the establishment of sound
and amicable relations with other communities, so
that they can all work in full harmony.

I understand, from various sources, that the
State of Indiana has not less than eighteen Jewish
congregations, all zealous for the glory of God and
active in the cause of Judaism. "The Lord God of

ALTAR BUILDING IN AMERICA 87

your fathers make you a thousand times as many
more as you are."

Now Shalom, like Charity, or Zedakah, begins
at home, and I hope that it will be in your co-operation
with the sister synagogues in the immediate neigh-
borhood that the effects of this blessed work will be
first seen. But this, naturally, is only the beginning.
These relations of Shalom must extend further to
the whole of the Keneseth Israel, the Congregation
of Israel. Judaism has no geographical limits. It is
as great as the world, and as wide as the universe, and
you must avoid every action of a sectarian or of a
schismatic nature, calculated to loosen the ties
between you and your brethren scattered over our
globe. In olden times the synagogues and the houses
of interpretation occasionally served as places offering
accommodation to travelers. We have now different
means of providing hospitality. But nothing must be
done in the synagogue which would deter a Jew from
seeking spiritual shelter. Our synagogues are, and
must remain, as of old, "the tents of Jacob, and the
dwelling place of Israel."

The last words of our text, baer heteb, demanding
that the words on the stones of the altar be lucidly
explained, gave rise, as you know, to the School of
Sopherim, the scribes whose office it was to read the
Book of the Law of God distinctly, giving the sense
and causing the poeple to understand the reading. In
time this activity resulted in the various Targumim,
the versions in the Aramaic vernacular of Onkelos
and Jonathan ben Uzziel, and into the Greek of
Aquila, a pupil of R. Akiba. The mission of the

88 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

modern Sopherim would accordingly be to explain
the words of the Torah, the prophets, the Psalmists
and the sages in the vernacular of today — which in
this country is the English language. I can quite
understand the attachment some of us feel toward the
German-jargon, or patois — call it what you will-
in which for so many centuries Jewish mothers wrote
their Techinoth (supplications), and which is still
spoken by such a large portion of Jewry. But let
us beware lest we attach any sacredness to this
dialect. America, some one rightly remarked, is the
grave of languages. No foreign language, be it ever
so rich in great masterpieces of literature survives
a single generation in this country. The children of
the immigrant who visit our public schools soon
compel their parents to speak English. It would
thus be a sin to attach the fortunes of our great
literature to the fortunes of this language, which is
a mere accident in our history, doomed to die, and
is dying before our very eyes. We cannot, we dare
not, endanger the Judaism of our children by making
a virtue of what may have once been an unfortunate
necessity, but at present, thank God, is becoming an
impossibility.

On the other hand, it is not necessary to dwell
here at length on the vital importance of Hebrew, the
Sacred tongue. It is the great depository of all that
is best in the soul-life of the Congregation of Israel.
Without it we will become a mere sect, without a
past, and without a literature, and without a proper
Liturgy, and severed from the great Tree which is
life unto those that cling to it. Hellenistic Judaism

ALTAR BUILDING IN AMERICA 89

is the only one known to history which dared to make
this experiment of dispensing with the Sacred Lan-
guage. The result was death. It withered away
and terminated in total and wholesale apostasy from
Judaism. Let us not deceive ourselves. There is
no future in this country for a Judaism that resists
either the English or the Hebrew language.

In the course of the ages the scribe of old became
the Rabbi of today. He reads and expounds the Law
at the solemn convocations in the synagogues, applies
it to the every-day needs and problems besetting
the lives of the worshipers, and perpetuates it by
teaching it diligently to the children of the com-
munity under his guidance. My friends, it is now
my pleasant duty to introduce to you your Rabbi,
my friend and disciple, Charles Isaiah Hoffman,
whom the Faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary
of America has recently found worthy of such a
high and holy office. He will cause the very stones
of his edifice to preach to you loyalty to our Torah.
He will become the Meturgeman, the Interpreter
to this community of the ancient Jewish truth;
his aim will ever be to bring the future generations
under the wings of the Schechinah.

"May the beauty of the Lord our God be upon
us; establish Thou the work of our hands upon us;
yea, the work of our hands establish thou it. Amen."

ZIONISM: A STATEMENT.*

THERE is a story told of a German Jew of the
older generation that when his friends came to
him about the beginning of the ' 'eighties" of the last
century, and asked what he thought of these new
attacks on the Jews, he looked rather astonished, and
said, "They are not new; they are the old ones." I
may say with equal justice that the attacks on Zion-
ism which have come lately from press and pulpit
are not new. They have been refuted ever so many
times, and have been as often repeated. Lest, how-
ever, my ignoring direct challenges would, in accord-
ance with the old rule, "Silence is tantamount to
admission," be taken as a proof that I have at last
become converted by the arguments of our opponents,
I will state here clearly the reasons for my allegiance
to Zionism. I wish only to premise that I am no
official expounder of Zionism. I am not claiming
or aspiring to the role of leadership in this movement.
The following remarks have only the value of repre-
senting the opinion of one of the rank and file, stating
clearly his attitude towards this movement, though
he believes that he reflects the views of a great number
of fellow Zionists.

Zionism is an ideal, and as such is indefinable.
It is thus subject to various interpretations and sus-
ceptive of different aspects. It may appear to one
as the rebirth of national Jewish consciousness, to
*First published in pamphlet form, December 28, 1906.

92 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

another as a religious revival, whilst to a third it
may present itself as a path leading to the goal of
Jewish culture; and to a fourth it may take the form
of the last and only solution of the Jewish problem.
By reason of this variety of aspects, Zionism has
been able to unite on its platform the most hetero-
geneous elements; representing Jews of all countries,
and exhibiting almost all the different types of culture
and thought as only a really great and universal
movement could command. That each of its repre-
sentatives should emphasize the particular aspect
most congenial to his way of thinking, and most
suitable for his mode of action, is only natural.
On one point, however, they all agree, namely, that
it is not only desirable, but absolutely necessary,
that Palestine, the land of our fathers, should be
recovered with the purpose of forming a home for
at least a portion of the Jews, who would lead there
an independent national life. That the language
of the leaders was sometimes ambiguous and not
quite definite in the declaration of this principle is
owing to the boldness of the proposition and the
environments in which these leaders were brought up,
where everything distinctly Jewish was in need of
an apology, rather than to any doubt about the final
aim of Zionism, as conceived in the minds of the great
majority of Zionists. Nor was it strange that some
backslidings should occur, and that in moments of
despair, counsels of despair should prevail, con-
sidering the terrible crises through which we have
passed during the last few years. The great majority
of Zionists remain loyal to the great idea of Zion and

ZIONISM: A STATEMENT 93

Jerusalem, to which history and tradition, and the
general Jewish sentiment, point. It is "God's
country" in the fullest and truest sense of the words.
It is the "Promised Land" still maintaining its place
in every Jewish heart, excepting those, perhaps, with
whom Jewish history commences about the year 1830,
and Jewish literature is confined to the transactions
of the Rabbinical synods of the last century, and the
files of PhiYippson'sAllgemeineZeitung des Judenthums.
To me personally, after long hesitation and careful
watching, Zionism recommended itself as the great
bulwark against assimilation. By assimilation I do
not understand what is usually understand by Ameri-
canization: namely, that every Jew should do his best
to acquire the English language; that he should study
American history and make himself acquainted with
the best productions of American literature; that he
should be a law-abiding citizen, thoroughly appre-
ciating the privilege of being a member of this great
commonwealth, and joyfully prepared to discharge
the duties of American citizenship. What I under-
stand by assimilation is loss of identity ; or that process
of disintegration which, passing through various
degrees of defiance of all Jewish thought and of dis-
loyalty to Israel's history and its mission, terminates
variously in different lands. In Germany, for instance
(where the pressure from above in favor of the
dominant religion is very strong), it ends in direct
and public apostasy; in other countries where this
pressure has been removed, it results in the severance
of all affiliation with the synagogue, and is followed
by a sort of "eclectic religiosity," that coquettes

94 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

with the various churches, not neglecting even the
Christian Science Temple, and is consummated by
a final, though imperceptible, absorption in the great
majority. This consummation will surely be hastened
by the gradual disappearance of social disparity.
What this process finally means for Judaism will
perhaps be best seen from the following quotation
from Wellhausen's History of Israel. After giving
Spinoza's oft-quoted view regarding the possibilities
of the absorption of Israel by its surroun lings,
the well-known Bible critic remarks: "The persistency
of the race may, of course, prove a harder thin^ to
overcome than Spinoza has supposed; but, never-
theless, he will be found to have spoken truly in
declaring that the so-called emancipation of the
Jews must inevitably lead to the extinction of Ju-
daism wherever the process is extended beyond the
political to the social sphere."

The only comfort that Wellhausen leaves us is
that "for the accomplishment of this, centuries may be
required." We, and the few generations that are to
succeed us, are to cheerfully abide in this intermediate
condition, and to acquiesce in the tortures of a slow
death; or, as the great Alexandrian sage in his descrip-
tion of the punishment awaiting the specially wicked,
expresses it, we are "to live continually dying,"
and to endure an unceasing dissolution until death
will have mercy upon us and will give us the last
coup de grace.

It is this kind of assimilation, with the terrible
consequences indicated, that I dread most; even more
than pogroms. To this form of assimilation, Zionism

ZIONISM: A STATEMENT 95

in the sense denned will prove, and is already proving
a most wholesome check. Whatever faults may be
found with its real or self-appointed leaders, Zionism
as a whole forms an opposing force against the
conception of the destiny of Israel and the interpre-
tation of its mission, the leading thought of which is
apparently the well-known epigram, " Whosoever shall
seek to gain his life shall lose it, but whosoever shall
lose his life shall preserve it." Zionism declares
boldly to the world that Judaism means to preserve its
life by not losing its life. It shall be a true and healthy
life, with a policy of its own, a religion wholly its
own, invigorated by sacred memories and sacred en-
vironments, and proving a tower of strength and of
unity not only for the remnant gathered within the
borders of the Holy Land, but also for those who
shall, by choice or necessity, prefer what now con-
stitutes the Galuth.

The term Galuth is here loosely used, expressing,
as I have often heard it, the despair and helplessness
felt in the presence of a great tragedy. And the
tragedy is not imaginary. It is real, and it exists
everywhere. It is a tragedy to see a great ancient
people, distinguished for its loyalty to its religion,
and its devotion to its sacred law, losing thousands
every day by the mere process of attrition. It is a
tragedy to see sacred institutions as ancient as the
mountains, to maintain which Israel for thousands of
years shrank from no sacrifice, destroyed before our
very eyes and exchanged for corresponding institu-
tions borrowed from hostile religions. It is a tragedy
to see a language held sacred by all the world, in

96 SEMI N A RY A DDRESSES

which Holy Writ was composed, and which served as
the depository of Israel's greatest and best thought,
doomed to oblivion and forced out gradually from
the synagogue. It is a tragedy to see the descendants
of those who revealed revelation to the world and who
developed the greatest religious literature in existence,
so little familiar with real Jewish thought, and so
utterly wanting in all sympathy with it, that they have
no other interpretation to offer of Israel's scriptures,
Israel's religion, and Israel's ideals and aspirations
and hopes, than those suggested by their natural
opponents, slavishly following their opinions, copying
their phrases, repeating their catchwords, not sparing
us even the taunt of tribalism and Orientalism. I am
not accusing anybody. I am only stating facts that
are the outcome of causes under which we all labor,
but for none of which any party in particular can be
made responsible, though it cannot be denied that some
among us rather made too much virtue of a necessity,
and indulged, and are still indulging in experiments in
euthanasia. The economic conditions under which we
live; the innate desire for comfort; the inherent ten-
dency towards imitation; the natural desire not to
appear peculiar; the accessibility of theological
systems, possessing all the seductions of ' 'newness
and modernity," patronized by fashion and even by
potentates, and taught in ever so many universities,
and condensed in dozens of encyclopedias, are
sufficient and weighty enough causes to account for
our tragedy. But, however natural the causes may
be, they do not alter the doom. The effects are bound
to be fatal. The fact thus remains that we are help-

ZIONISM: A STATEMENT 97

less spectators in the face of great tragedies, in other
words, that we are in Galuth. This may not be the
Galuth of the Jews, but it is the Galuth of Judaism,
or, as certain mystics expressed it, the Galuth of
Hannephesh, the Galuth of the Jewish soul wasting
away before our very eyes. With a little modifica-
tion we might repeat here the words of a Jewish
Hellenist of the second century who, in his grief,
exclaims: "Wherefore is Israel given up as a reproach
to the heathen, and for what cause is the people whom
Thou best loved given unto ungodly nations, and why
is the law of our forefathers brought to naught, and
the written covenants come to none effect? And we
pass away out of the world as grasshoppers, and our
life is astonishment and fear, and we are not worthy
to obtain mercy."

The foregoing remarks have made it clear that I
belong to that class of Zionists that lay more stress on
the religious-national aspects of Zionism than on any
other feature peculiar to it. The rebirth of Israel's
national consciousness, and the revival of Israel's
religion, or, to use a shorter term, the revival of
Judaism, are inseparable. When Israel found itself,
it found its God. When Israel lost itself, or began to
work at its self-effacement, it was sure to deny its
God. The. selection of Israel, the indestructibility of
God's covenant with Israel, the immortality of Israel
as a nation, and the final restoration of Israel to
Palestine, where the nation will live a holy life on
holy ground, with all the wide-reaching consequences
of the conversion of humanity and the establishment
of the Kingdom of God on earth — all these are the

98 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

common ideals and the common ideas that permeate
the whole of Jewish literature extending over nearly
four thousand years, including the largest bulk of the
Hellenistic portion of it. The universalistic passages
in the Scripture usually paraded by the "prophetic
Jew" as implying the final disappearance, or extinc-
tion of Israel, are in every case misquotations torn
from their context, or ignoring other utterances by
the same writer. Indeed, our prophetic Jew

"Boldly pilfers from the Pentateuch:
And, undisturbed by conscientious qualms,
Perverts the Prophets, and purloins the Psalms."

The interpretations smuggled into the passages are
just as false and unscientific as the well-known Chris-
tological passages extracted from the Old Testament,
and even from the Talmud, to be met with in mis-
sionary tracts, composed especially for the benefit
of fresh converts.

The reproach that Zionism is unspiritual is mean-
ingless. Indeed, there seems to be a notion abroad
that spirituality is a negative quality. Take any
ideal, and translate it into action, any sentiment of
reverence, and piety, and give it expression through
a symbol or ceremony, speak of the human yearning
after communion with God, and try to realize it
through actual prayer, and you will be at once de-
nounced as unspiritual. However, the imputation is
as old as the days when the name Pharisee became a
reproach, and it is not to be expected that the Zionists
would be spared. In general, it is the antinominian
who will tell you that he is the only heir to the rare
quality of spirituality, whereas the real saint is in

ZIONISM: A STATEMENT 99

all his actions so spontaneous and so natural that he
is entirely unconscious of possessing spirituality,
and practically never mentions it.

The Zionists are no saints, but they may fairly
claim that few movements are more free from the
considerations of convenience and comfort, and less
tainted with worldliness and other worldliness than
the one which they serve. Nothing was to be gained
by joining it. All the powers that be, were, and still
are, opposed to it, whether in their capacity as indi-
viduals or as wealthy corporations. The Zionists
are just beginning to be tolerated, but I remember
distinctly the time when adhesion to the cause of
Zionism might interfere with the prospects of a man's
career, the cry being, "no Zionists need apply." The
classes from which the Zionists were recruited were
mostly the poorest among the poor. College men and
university men, more blessed with enthusiasm and
idealism than with the goods of this world, also
furnished a fair quota. But this lack of means did
not prevent them from responding most generously
to every appeal made on behalf of the cause. They
taxed themselves to the utmost of their capacity, and
beyond. I myself have witnessed cases in which men
and women joyfully contributed their last earnings,
foregoing their summer vacations, for which they had
been saving a whole year.

The activity of Zionism must not be judged by
what it has accomplished in Zion and Jerusalem —
where it has to deal with political problems as yet
not ripe for solution — but by what it has thus far
achieved for Zion and Jerusalem, through the awaken-

100 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

ing of the national Jewish consciousness, notwith-
standing the systematic and ruthless efforts made in
the opposite direction during the greater part of the
last century. Our synagogues and our homes plainly
show the effect. Zion and Jerusalem have not been
allowed to stand as a sad, glorious remembrance of
a past, as mere objects of pious sentiment. Indeed,
the astounding discovery was made that far from
being considered as a day of disaster, the Ninth
of Ab has to be looked upon as a day of liberation,
when Judaism threw off the shackles of nationalism
to congeal into a mere Church — with a ritual and a
body of doctrines to be promulgated some nineteen
hundred years later. Unfortunately, Israel was
smitten with blindness, failing to understand its real
destiny, and in the perversion of its heart, for eighteen
hundred years observed the Ninth of Ab as a day of
mourning and weeping, of humiliation and fasting,
thus wilfully delaying its redemption. I have always
wondered that the Church was not yet enterprising
enough to put up a statue in gratitude to its benefactor
Titus, the delectus generis humani, representing the
goddess Universa, with a scribe and a priest cowering
in chains at her feet.

The work, accordingly, in which Zionism had to
engage first, and in which it will have to continue for
many years to come, was the work of regeneration.
It had to re-create the Jewish consciousness before
creating the Jewish state. In this respect, Zionism
has already achieved great things. There is hardly a
single Jewish community in any part of the globe
which is not represented by a larger or smaller num-

ZIONISM: A STATEMENT 101

her of men and women acknowledging themselves as
Zionists and standing out as a living protest against
the tendencies just hinted at. It has created a press,
and has called into life a host of lecturers and speakers
propagating its doctrines and preaching them boldly
to Israel all over the world. It has given the world
Asher Ginzberg, or, as he is better known, by the
pen name of Achad Ha-am, one of our finest intellects
and most original thinkers; and he is followed by a
whole host of disciples, all of them working under the
stimulus of the Jewish national ideal, much as they
may differ in the Zionistic aspects they happen to
emphasize. It has enriched our literature with a
large number of novels and lyrics, and even distinct
Zionist melodies are not wanting. It has further
called into existence numerous societies, whose aim
it is to make the sacred tongue a living language
by means of writing and even conversing in it, while
in several communities special schools have been
established with the same end in view. To better
advance this end, a whole series of Hebrew primers,
grammars and reading books for the young have been
produced. Several translations prepared from Ger-
man, French and English works bearing on Jewish
history and cognate subjects, all of them calculated
to strengthen religious-national consciousness, have
also appeared under the inspiration of Zionism. Fore-
most of all, Zionism has succeeded in bringing back
into the fold many men and women, both here and
in Europe, who otherwise would have been lost to
Judaism. It has given them a new interest in the
synagogue and everything Jewish, and put before

1 02 SEMI N A RY A D DRESSES

them an ideal worthy of their love and their sacrifice.
Cases have come under my notice where Jewish col-
lege men, at a comparatively advanced age, began
to study the sacred language and to repair to the
synagogue, sharing both in its joys and in its griefs,
some among them encountering the displeasure and
ridicule of their relatives, who were fanatical assim-
ilators and who bring up their children without
religious education of any kind. Of course, back-
slidings and relapses occur; but it is an advantage
to Zionism that in its present condition, at least,
it is all sacrifice and no gain. It holds out no prospect
to the ambitious and to "those who exalt themselves
to establish .the vision" of a Jewish state without
Jewish memories, without historic foundation and
without traditional principles. The undesirables
and the impatient will thus, under one pretense or
another, leave it soon, and indeed are dropping out
already, so that its purification of all alloy and discord-
ant elements is only a question of a very short time.
The taunt of retrogression and reaction has no
terrors for us. To insist on progressing when one has
come to the conclusion that a step forward means ruin
is sheer obstinacy. Unless we are convinced so deeply
of our infallibility that we take every utterance of
ours as a divine revelation, and our every action as
a precedent and a tradition, there may come a time
in our lives when we may have to return. As a
fact, Zionism is the natural rebound from an artificial
and overstrained condition of things which could
no longer last. It is the Declaration of Jewish
Independence from all kinds of slavery, whether

ZIONISM: A STATEMENT 103

material or spiritual. It is as natural and instinctive
as life itself, and no amount of scolding and abuse
will prevent the reassertion of the Jewish soul which
in our unconscious Zionism is an actual present-day
experience, though the expression given to it takes
different shape in different minds. Moreover,
Zionism thoroughly believes in progress and develop-
ment; but it must be progress along Jewish lines, and
the goal to be reached must be the Jewish historic ideal.
But, whilst Zionism is constantly winning souls
for the present, it is at the same time preparing for us
the future, which will be a Jewish future. Only then,
when Judaism has found itself, when the Jewish soul
has been redeemed from the Galuth, can Judaism
hope to resume its mission to the world. Everybody
whose view has not been narrowed by the blinkers
imposed on him by his little wing or by party con-
siderations, knows well enough that it is not only
traditional religion which is on trial. We are on a
veritable volcano created by the upheavals of the
newest methods of "searching research," which
respects as little the new formulae, such as the cate-
goric imperative, conscience, the notion of duty and
the concept of morality and ethics, as it does creeds
and dogmas. The disruption may come at any mo-
ment unless revelation is reasserted. The declara-
tion, Freedom is our Messiah, which I have so often
heard, may be good Fourth of July oratory, but it is
miserably bad theology, and worse philosophy, hav-
ing in view the terrible woes and complicated problems
besetting humanity. Now, what happened once may
happen again, and Israel may another time be called

104 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

upon with its mission to the nations. Under the
present conditions, however, we have neither a de-
nned mission, nor does any man take this ' 'mission"
seriously, and the talk about it is allowed to be a
mere licencia predicatomm. But we know that the
Bible which influenced humanity so deeply and
proved so largely instrumental in the partial con-
version of the world, arose in Palestine or in circles
which looked on Palestine as their home. Those who
wrote the Bible moved and had their whole being
in the religious national idea, and lived under the
discipline of the Law. History may, and to my
belief, will repeat itself, and Israel will be the chosen
instrument of God for the new and final mission; but
then Israel must first effect its own redemption and
live again its own life, and be Israel again, to accom-
plish its universal mission. The passages in the Bible
most distinguished for their universalistic tendency
and grandeur are, as is well known, the verses in
Isaiah and Micah, and there it is solemnly pro-
claimed: "Out of Zion shall go forth the law, and
the word of the Lord from Jerusalem."

Our sages have themselves given expression to
this correspondence between the universalistic and
the nationalistic elements in Judaism. A solemn
declaration, thus they declare, has the Holy One,
blessed be He, registered: "I will not enter the heav-
enly Jerusalem, until Israel shall come to the earthly
Jerusalem." Not in conflict but in consonance with
Israel's establishment of the divine institutions in
their full integrity in God's own land, will be the
triumph in all its glory of the Kingdom of Heaven.

THE PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.*

MY Friends: It is now the fourth time that we
meet in this hall to participate in the com-
mencement exercises of this Seminary. Our pleasant
task will be to do honor to those to whom honor is
due, conferring the degree of Rabbi on some, the
degree of Doctor on others, and awarding prizes to
those who, by their particular industry and devotion
to learning deserve this distinction. It is, to my
knowledge, the first time that the Seminary confers
the Doctor Degree for work done, upon which occa-
sion I congratulate both the faculty and the direc-
tors. The importance of this degree consists in the
fact that it shows that our students do not rest sat-
isfied with that title which enables them to perform
the necessary functions in their respective Syna-
gogues, but that they endeavor to continue their
studies, the foundations of which were laid at the
Seminary.

In a previous graduation address, I had occasion
to speak of the various activities of the Rabbi and
the different needs of the community which a Rabbi
is expected to superintend. I propose to offer a few
remarks on this solemn occasion on the subject of
Talmud Torah. By Talmud Torah I do not mean
the study of Jewish literature as pursued by the Rabbi
and the few professional students. The Talmud

*Address delivered at the Graduating Exercises of the Seminary,
June 2, 1907.

106 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

Torah of which I wish to speak on this occasion is
the study of the Torah, extended to the humblest
member of the community, reaching the very babes;
or, as the term is commonly used as a synonym of
the "iBDn J"P3 (the public school). In this capacity
the Talmud Torah is one of the main objects for which
synagogues are built and Rabbis are appointed.
Thus, Judges 5:11 is paraphrased by an ancient
Rabbi, "Here is a small settlement in Israel. And
they rose and built a synagogue and appointed a
sage and engaged teachers for the children. The
good example is followed by another city in its
neighborhood. They also built a synagogue and en-
gaged teachers. And so the schools increase in Israel,
in which the righteous acts of the Lord are rehearsed
even in the very villages." The establishment of a
school for children, or the erection of the Talmud
Torah, and equipping it with the necessary staff is
here regarded as the main function of the synagogue.
This was the rule which was followed by Israel
almost throughout its long history. No community
was too small to provide for the instruction of the
young, and no sacrifice was too great.

How deeply this sentiment took root in Israel
may be seen by the various references to bequests
for the Talmud Torah scattered over the Response, of
the Middle Ages and other historical records. In a
Responsum dating from the sixteenth century, men-
tion is made of a single bequest of one hundred thou-
sand lebenim for educational purposes. This would
be a princely donation even in our own times, con-
sidering the purchasing value of money in the six-

PROBLEM OF RELIGIO US ED UCA TION 107

teenth century, which was about fifteen times as
much as it is at present. The first task, again,
which the Jewish community at Amsterdam, entirely
consisting of refugees from various parts of Europe,
set to itself was the building up of a model school.
Rabbi Sheftel Horwitz, of Frankfort, a place more
distinguished at that period for its piety and erudi-
tion than for system and method, shed tears of joy
when he visited the school, with its fine building, its
graded schedule, and its excellent discipline, and
recommended it as a model to his fellow-countrymen,
the German Jews. The community of Cracow,
again, in the sixteenth century, after passing through
terrible epidemics, took the first opportunity after
its return to normal conditions to reorganize its
schools, which, coinciding with the distress of the
times, was only done at a great sacrifice on the part
of its members.

However, it is not my intention to dwell here
upon the history of the Talmud Torah and its various
improvements, which may easily be found in a num-
ber of books dealing with this subject. All I want
to urge is, first, that the Talmud Torah is an essential
adjunct to the Synagogue. Secondly, that it is just
after great historical catastrophes that the impor-
tance of the Talmud Torah is even more realized than
before, and forms a main feature in the programme
of the newly settled or reorganized congregations.
The school children are, as the Rabbis suggest, the
very "flower and blossom of the Courts of our Lord,"
so that the synagogue and the establishment of the
Talmud Torah in a sorely tried community means

108 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

a new pledge for the rejuvenation of Israel. The
conditions of a great part of Jewry in America are in
many respects not dissimilar to those of the Amster-
dam community. Our numbers consist chiefly of
immigrants fleeing from conditions resembling those
of Europe in the seventeenth century, and like those
refugees, we are also engaged in the process of the
creation of our institutions. Much has been done
of which every American Jew can be truly proud.
Our places of worship and our charitable institu-
tions, which are constantly increasing in number
and in weight, bear comparison with those of the
oldest communities in Europe and Asia. But there
is one sore point which requires the serious attention
of our leaders, and that is the Talmud Torah. I by
no means overlook the fact that we are already in
possession of institutions set apart for the purpose
of training Rabbis and devoted to the cause of higher
Jewish learning. To those already in existence, a
new one is to be added by the munificence of the late
Moses A. Dropsie, at Philadelphia, under the direc-
tion of experienced guides and trusted leaders,
whose work, I have no doubt, will likewise contribute
to magnify the cause of Jewish learning and to make
it glorious.

Yet it must be stated that as long as we have
no proper Talmud Torah, the higher learning will
always remain without a basis and never take root on
American soil. The normal conditions in olden times
seem to have been that of a thousand persons entering
the Talmud Torah, the largest number obtained a
fair knowledge of the Bible, a smaller number became

PROBLEM OF RELIGIO US ED UCA TION 109

acquainted with the Mishnah and a certain fraction
even acquired a knowledge of the Talmud; whilst it
was only one of a thousand who was considered
capable of giving decisions, or as we would say, of
exercising the functions of the Rabbi in the widest
sense of the word. We have fairly provided for the
one in a thousand, but have done very little for the
remaining nine hundred and ninety-nine. I by no
means ignore the existence of our Sunday Schools, in
addition to a certain number of Talmud Torah schools
and a large number of private tutors in religion, or
Melamdim, but they are quite out of proportion to
the numbers which are left without any religious
instruction. In a conversation lately with a gentle-
man familiar with the statistics of New York, I
learned to my surprise that there must be at least
150,000 Jewish children in New York, and that the
provision for religious instruction, by rough calcula-
tion, hardly amounts to the relief even of the third
part of this number. These are alarming conditions.
But what is worse is that we could hardly supply the
deficiency even if we had the will, for we are still
to a large extent lacking in everything indispensable
for the building up of the Talmud Torah.

The first difficulty under which we labor is the
great dearth of trained teachers. The old private
tutor, or Melamed, is an impossibility in this country
for any length of time. Judging by results which
held good for many centuries, it would be hazardous
to say that his method was entirely wrong. However,
great as the results may have been to which he can
point in former generations and under different con-

110 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

ditions, it is not likely that he will be able to main-
tain his status much longer. Neither his medium of
instruction nor his method is to be recommended
in the case of boys brought up in an American public
school. It is especially his medium of instruction
which is a thing impossible in this country, and sooner
or later it must give way to the English language,
the language of our fellow-citizens, the language of
the public schools, and the language of all other
institutions of learning. The American teacher, with
his knowledge of the English language and his
familiarity with the best educational methods, will
thus in the end prove to be the only fit person to
instruct also in religion, but unfortunately he is not
always sufficiently equipped with a knowledge of
Hebrew things in general and the Hebrew language
in particular, to enable him to accomplish his duties
in a satisfactory manner. A thorough and sound
knowledge of Hebrew is an indispensable qualification
of every teacher in a Jewish religious school. It is
the sacred language, it is the language of the Bible, it
is the language of the Prayer Book and the despository
of all the sublimest thoughts and noblest sentiments
that Israel taught and felt for more than three thousand
years. It is the tie that unites us with millions of
worshippers in the same sacred language, who are
our brothers and our brethren in spite of all the
latest theological discoveries and ethnological hypoth-
eses. It is the natural language of the Jew when
in communion with his God ; he divines more than he
is able to explain. Translations are a poor makeshift
at best, and more often a miserable caricature. For

PROBLEM OF RELIGIO US ED UCA TION 1 1 1

more than twenty-three centuries the world has been
busy with the interpretation and translation of the
Scriptures, and yet no agreement has been reached
as to the exact rendering of the fourth verse of the
sixth chapter of Deuteronomy containing the confes-
sion of Israel's creed. But the Jew reads the J?OtP
^tfW and does know it. He cannot translate it, but
he feels it and is it. For, as the mystics have it, to
be a thing is to know a thing, and to know a thing
is to be a thing.

I am aware that there are some well-meaning
persons who maintain that the fate of religion should
not be made dependent on a certain language. The
real question is what we mean by religion. If we are
indifferent as to the nature of the religion (confusing
it with religiosity) any language will do. It may
blossom out into an ethical cult, it may develop into
the worship of the beautiful and the sublime, or may
take the shape of the Service of Man. Constituted,
however, as human nature is, with its hankering
after the mysterious and its tendency towards the
worship of Sorrow, it is more probable that this
"distilled religion" will sooner or later evaporate
into a sort of Spiritualism or Christian Science. Of
this possibility the signs are not wanting even at the
present moment. But whatever shape it may take,
it will certainly not be Judaism. When the last
sound of Hebrew will have disappeared from our syna-
gogues, the last trace of Judaism will also have gone.

We must thus insist upon Hebrew. But for this
we require proper training schools. All our means at
present are of a perfunctory nature and accomplish

1 1 2 SEM IN A RY A D DRESSES

very little. The Seminary has with inadequate means
tried to cope with this difficulty, but I do not think
that it will ever accomplish this mission without
increasing its staff of teachers for this purpose, and
extending its curriculum and the number of hours of
instruction. But above all, no training can be perfect
without the help of a model school in which the teach-
ers should impart instruction for a certain number
of years under the supervision of their professors.
The second crying need is the almost utter lack
of text-books. Through some cause or other, the
English language is the poorest in this kind of liter-
ature. We have as yet no Jewish history fit to place
in the hands of a teacher or pupil, no readers for the
different grades, and no commentary to the Bible
written in a Jewish spirit. I am glad to announce
on this occasion that the Jewish Publication Society,
recognizing this last want, is now engaged in the prep-
aration of such a commentary as will undoubtedly
have the effect of bringing the Bible back to the Jew.
We must have a whole series of primers and readers
and text-books and histories extending at least over
a course of eight years, commencing with the Hebrew
alphabet and culminating somewhere in the later
Hebrew literature. I cannot refrain on this occasion
from paying my tribute to our brethren in Russia,
who amidst all the persecutions by which these last
decades have been marked, have produced a large
educational literature covering almost all the subjects
fit for .instruction, which excites the envy and ad-
miration of every student. It is humiliating to think
that with all the means at our disposal and our various

PROBLEM OF RELIGIO US ED UCA TION 113

societies constantly discussing the topic I am just
dealing with, we should be in this respect behind
our brethren in the East, the poorest among the poor,
and engaged in a deadly struggle with all the powers
of darkness.

But it is only when we have provided for the
needs of the nine hundred and ninety-nine, by well-
equipped training schools for teachers and proper
text-books in the English language, fit to be put in
the hands of the so-called laity, that the mission of
the thousandth (that of the Rabbi) will be accom-
plished. Without this broad basis of the congrega-
tion at large, and its hearty co-operation, the work
of the Rabbi will never be effective. The knowledge
of the one will never be able to grapple successfully
with the ignorance of the many. The old saying was,
"Knowledge is Power." Paradox as it may seem,
everyone will admit that Ignorance is a greater
Power — on the side of destruction. I do not hesitate
for a moment to maintain that the excesses in the
camp of Judaism which we witness, and this un-
ceasing succession of spiritual amputations which is
going on before our very eyes, is mainly owing to the
insufficient acquaintance with the tenets of Judaism,
its traditions of the past and its aspirations and hopes
for the future on the part of the nine hundred and
ninety-nine. Never before were the words of the
Prophet so fully realized, uMy people are destroyed
for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected
knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no
priest to me : seeing that thou hast forgotten the Law
of thy God, I will also forget thy children." (Hos. 4:6)

1 1 4 SEMI N A RY A D DRESSES

We are laboring under the peculiar idea that we shall
benefit Judaism by removing the last vestige of the
Sabbath, by abolishing the Day of Atonement, or
robbing it of its most essential features, by banishing
the Sefer Torah from the place of worship, and by
removing the last shreds of the sacred language.
This seems to be the programme of the twentieth
century, and this is what we call progress in Judaism.
Nay, we hail it as hastening the day in which "the
upright shall exult, and the saints triumphantly
rejoice," — the day which formed one of Israel's
brightest visions and the object of Israel's prayers for
thousands of years. It never occurs to us that this
irreverence for the past, this perpetual battering away
at institutions considered sacred by the great majority
of mankind, this worship of individualism which in
most cases is nothing more than thinly disguised
selfishness and vanity, and this disregard of authority
and the utter absence of the qualities of submission
and obedience are, in part at least, responsible for
the rampant materialism and unrighteousness which
we all so much deplore.

A great European thinker somewhere remarked,
"America, with its lack of high culture, is the only
nation in our day which has been able to furnish soil
for new religions." This is a malicious libel. A
country which has given to the world men of the
stamp of Emerson, Channing, Lowell, Motley, and so
many other celebrities, can in all respects compare
favorably with any part of the Old World; but I
cannot help saying that my heart fails me when I
see the mushroom religions springing up around us,

PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 115

the constant travesties and caricatures of the Bible
which we are witnessing, and the assurance with which
men offer their undigested thoughts as substitutes
for religion. As to the experiments to which Judaism
is often subjected, the least one can say is that they
show that our knowledge of religion and the great
historical forces at work in the spiritual world are
of an amateur order. Be an idea ever so absurd, be
it ever so incompatible with all laws of history and
philosophy, ever so antagonistic to the spirit of Ju-
daism and its teachings, it will always find a response
among us, provided it has eloquence and smartness
on its side, and is uttered with that certainty and
assurance which ignorance alone can command.

My young friends, ere long you will be active in
Jewish communities. Your activities will be arduous
and manifold. Holiness as understood by Judaism,
and righteousness as understood by Judaism and by
the large bulk of humanity will be the subjects that
will occupy your attention. But never forget the
Talmud Torah. Do apply yourselves to the training
of the nine hundred and ninety-nine, so that they may
be in time your equals in the knowledge of Judaism.
Be not afraid that a universal knowledge of the
Scriptures and of the important works embodying
Jewish tradition and Jewish history will in any way
curtail your authority. The Sabbath preceding the
Day of Atonement and the one preceding the Passover
were, as you know, the fete days of the Synagogue,
when the Rabbi would give lengthy discourses on
some complicated Halachic subjects. Both the pupils
and the members of the Congregation were permitted

1 1 6 SEMI N A RY A D DRESSES

to take part in the discussion, but none felt prouder
than the Rabbi if one of his congregants would stop
him with the words, "Master, you have overlooked
a paragraph in Maimonides' Code," or, "Master,
according to your argument this or that passage in
the Novelae of Rabbi Solomon ben Adereth would
be quite unintelligible," for such contradiction on the
part of the so-called "laity" showed that the work of
the Rabbi was effective, and that he and his pre-
decessors had done their duty by the community
with regard to Talmud Torah. This is the pride
which you ought to cultivate, and make it the goal
of your ambition. It is a poor sort of authority which
derives its infallibility from the helplessness of the
majority. The authority that maintains itself by
the ignorance of the masses is not worth having.

One of the most important characteristics of the
synagogue was its democratic constitution, placing
everybody under the law and making the knowledge
of the law accessible to all. Under the law, we are
all equals; outside of the law, or, as it is called, above
the law, is anarchy and confusion, resulting in tyranny.
In politics, we are overwhelmed by the dragoon; in
the spiritual world, we are crushed by the talker.
My friends, restore to the synagogue its democratic
spirit. Remain in the service of the law, and do not
aspire to be above the law. This is not spirituality;
this is conspiracy. In the synagogue everybody
taught, everybody learned, everybody contributed
his or her share in its building up, in its aspect as a
collection of institutions making for the sanctifica-
tion of life in its various manifestations. To hand

PROBLEM OF RELIGIO US ED UCA TION 117

over one's conscience and things most sacred to a
single individual, be he ever so great, brands one as a
"slave by his own compulsion," or as indifferent to
the cause of religion. This is neither American nor
Jewish. Remember, my friends, the words of Mai-
monides: "The guarantee for the survival of Judaism
is the continuance of the knowledge of God's Torah
and the acquaintance with His word among us."
With the disappearance of the Torah, the synagogue
itself can become a danger to itself and a playground
for all the forces of destruction. It may cease to be
a Beth Hakneseth, suggestive of the Keneseth Israel,
where the spirit of Catholic Israel dwells, and become
a Dy W2 (the House of the Plebs), where multitudes
enjoy "intellectual treats," even at the very expense
of Judaism. Only knowledge of Judaism can ward
off this danger. For thus it is written:

"They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my
holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the
knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the

MORITZ STEINSCHNEIDER.*

THE year 1907 brought many a bereavement
to the Jewish student. It is sufficient to men-
tion here the names of Solomon Buber, the great
editor and interpreter of the Midrashic literature;
Dr. Adolph Neubauer, the compiler of the catalogue
of the Hebrew manuscripts in the Oxford libraries,
and Professor Jacob Freudenthal, one of the very
few Jewish students who made the study of (Hellen-
istic) literature the subject of their thorough re-
searches. But the death of none came so unexpectedly
as that of Moritz Steinschneider. That the immortal
Steinschneider should ever die, that the man whom
every Jewish student for more than two generations
was in the habit of consulting first, when approaching
a new subject, should ever be removed from the stage
of his great activity, was something for which we were
hardly prepared. He lived with all of us, and he
survived so many of us, that one could rather think
of having one's own death some day recorded by
Steinschneider in one of his bibliographical notices,
than to write his obituary.

Nor is this task a very easy one, considering that
his life extended over ninety-one years, and that it
-was all activity. As of the great "scribe of the law,"
it may also be said of him that his vision never be-
came dimmed, and that his freshness never dis-

*Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American
Jewish Historical Society, 1908.

120 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

appeared until his dying day. Moreover, this activity
was not confined to a single branch of Jewish liter-
ature. His main attention seems to have been di-
rected to the works of the Jewish philosophers, certain
of which he edited and all of which he fully described.
But this did not prevent him from being interested
in such subjects as the Jewish share in the secular
sciences, or the Jewish controversies with Moham-
medans and Christians, or the Jewish contributions
to the pseudographic literature of the world and
similar topics.

In consideration of these facts, I must refer you
for a real appreciation of Steinschneider's genius, and
the importance- of his literary activity, to the admi-
rable introduction to Steinschneider's Gesammelte
Werke by Drs. Malter and Marx. Here only a few
general remarks must suffice. As I have just said,
Steinschneider lived ninety-one years. His early
youth thus brings us back to the so-called Measphim
period, the period of the Jewish rationalists. These
were mostly recruited from Mendelssohn's disciples,
or those who believed themselves to be his disciples,
whose productions are embodied in the periodical
called Ha-Measeph. These publications are distin-
guished by the fine Hebrew style in which they were
written, which style, however, seems to have been
meant to cover a multitude of cheap rationalistic
platitudes, appearing to us almost childish and value-
less. Mendelssohn was of course their patron saint,
but they also claimed, as indeed many a superficial
theologian does to this day, Maimonides and a few
other Spanish Rabbis as their own. History was for

MORITZ STEINSCHNEIDER 121

them non-existent. The few who dabbled in history,
such as Peter Beer and his friends, showed only their
utter impotence. Bishop Stubbs, the famous historian
of the English Constitution, made a remark some-
where that no "dissenter" could ever write a good
history of the English people and their institutions,
as for them England only commences with Cromwell
and other heroes of the Reformation. This may
also be applied to the Jewish "dissenters" and their
successors up to date, with whom Jewish history only
begins with Mendelssohn. The reaction, or rather
progress, came soon, represented by such men as
Rapoport, Krochmal, and Zunz, who, with all their
admiration for Mendelssohn, knew that Jewish
history began somewhere in pre-historic times, that
it was never interrupted by any circumstance, arid
that even the Middle Ages, with their long suffering
and the darkness, covering the greater part of our
globe, contributed their legitimate share of Jewish
thought and Jewish activity to this history. Against
all fashion of the time, Krochmal showed how the
Talmud, the very bete noir of these rationalists,
could be made an available source for this history.
Rapoport did the same thing for the Responsa of
the Geonim and other mediaeval productions, whilst
Zunz, among other things, set himself to show the
world what the Rabbis of the Franco-German schools
contributed to Jewish thought, both in their com-
mentaries on the Bible and the Talmud. He even
showed that there is a great deal to learn from the
Piyutim, the liturgical contributions of the mediaeval
Rabbis, who were then the special subject of abuse
by those who believed that the depth of devotion

122 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

stands in inverse ratio to the length of the prayers.
All these men were attacked in their turn by the
rationalists, but truth and broadness of view con-
quered in the end. Even Abraham Geiger largely
followed their lead, though he was never able to
entirely forget that he was the leader of the opposi-
tion busy in composing ' 'protocols" upsetting history.

Steinschneider was, to use a Talmudical term,
"the fellow-disciple of all these great men." He learnt
from Krochmal, though I am not certain that he
ever saw him, but he attended the lectures of Rapo-
port in Prague, and was a close and intimate friend
of Zunz, whom he followed in almost every detail
in his famous sketch of Jewish literature, which we
possess now in three versions, German, English and
Hebrew. But, like all "fellow-disciples," he was not
a mere reproducer of the works of his masters, but
supplemented them greatly, and it was this supple-
mentary work which became so important for the
great majority of students.

It is true that some of Steinschneider's most
important works aimed chiefly, as Drs. Malter and
Marx rightly point out, at showing the position of
the Jew in the literature of the world at large. We
need here only point to Steinschneider's "Contribu-
tions of the Jews to Mathematics," "Contributions
of the Jew to Medicine," and his work, "The Jews
as translators and interpreters," etc., but these works
are chiefly meant for the specialist of the sciences
in question. The work by which he will after all be
best remembered, and which has become the Urim
and Thummim of every Jewish student, is his catalogue
of the Bodleian Library and his other numerous

MORITZ STEINSCHNEIDER 123

contributions to Jewish bibliography. The bibliog-
rapher is, as is well known, the forerunner of the
historian, for it is only when you know the sources
of your subject and their sequence, that you can form
a notion of the genesis and development of thought,
and this was the great gift which Steinschneider
bestowed on every one of us in dozens of volumes.
Let any student who is anxious to write about the
thought of a given period, try to dispense with Stein-
schneider, and he will find out at once how many
anachronisms he will commit in the short space of
a single generation.

As a bibliographer, Steinschneider was strictly
' 'objective" or impartial. You cannot, with all the
sympathy in the world, alter or interpret a single date
in favor of a given theory or of a popular person.
This impartiality is also manifest in all his other
works, where he deals more with systems and theories
than with dates and periods. Indeed, he was so im-
partial, that he occasionally became unjust, as, for
instance, when he only lately attacked his friend and
disciple, Professor David Kaufmann, on account of
his using the term Jewish heroes and similar hyper-
bolic metaphors. It may also be that Steinschneider
never entirely emancipated himself from the ration-
alism of his youth, or rather boyhood, when there
was so little sympathy for Jewish heroism and so
little understanding of that quality of Holiness, a
distinguished feature of Jewish great men and Jewish
great women, that was entirely misconceived and
misrepresented by the generation which followed
Voltaire. However, it is not for us of a later genera-
tion, who never knew the struggle, to criticise the

124 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

man from whom we learned so much. His peculiari-
ties and his occasional attacks on men whom we admire
and revere, will soon enough be forgotten. They were
only accidental with him and formed by no means
a part of his system. He fortunately never accepted
any system in its entirety, and never joined in any
movement. Nay, everybody familiar with his works
knows that he was thoroughly suspicious of all those
systems and movements in Bible criticism and inter-
pretations of Jewish history which are now the sub-
ject of heated controversy. He was skeptic enough
to question skepticism itself, but he left us quite
enough of what is positive, constructive and instruc-
tive in all departments of Jewish thought and Jewish
literature to render his name a blessing for all time.
But it must be a special source of satisfaction to this
Society, of which Steinschneider was an honorary
member, to know that his name will be particularly
connected with our great country. For, thanks to
the munificence of the Honorable Jacob H. Schiff,
Steinschneider's library now forms a part of the
collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary of
America. His books are full of annotations, contain-
ing untold treasures for the Jewish student. It also
deserves special mention that it is two American
scholars, Dr. Malter, of the Hebrew Union College,
of Cincinnati (now of the Dropsie College, Phila-
delphia), and Dr. Marx, of the Jewish Theological
Seminary of America, whom Steinschneider entrusted
with the edition of his Gesammelte Schriften to appear
in five volumes. His memory will thus never dis-
appear from among the Jews, but will be especially
connected with American Judaism.

RABBI AS A PERSONAL EXAMPLE.*

IT IS now the fifth time that we meet in this hall
to participate in the commencement exercises of
the Seminary. The pleasant duty with which we have
just been occupied was to confer degrees upon seven
of our graduates. The labor was long, extending
over years, and the work was by no means easy,
covering a multitude of subjects demanding serious
study and close application, but the reward has come
at last in the shape of degrees just conferred — the
only reward in the gift of the authorities of this
institution.

But my young friends, do not flatter yourselves
that your labors are at an end. They are only begin-
ning. There is a story of an ancient Rabbi who
warned his pupils when they were about to enter
upon the performance of their duties, as follows:
"Believe not that I make you masters: behold, you
are appointed servants." The words sound harsh,
but they contain a great truth which is often over-
looked in our times, and that is — that no man in
authority is greater than the source whence his
authority is derived. The authority of the Rabbi
is derived from the Torah; he is its servant, not its
master. He may claim obedience to his teachings
by the authority of the Torah, or minn PD as
the Hebrew phrase is, but he has no power over the

*Address delivered at the Graduating Exercises of the Seminary,
June 7, 1908.

126 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

Torah. The mystical prayer Berich Sh'meh, read
in most congregations by the Rabbi before the open
ark, contains the following solemn declaration:

nop smoi sin 7-12 Ktrnpi xn
rp-nK -in

"I am the servant of the Holy One, blessed be He,
before whom and before whose glorious Law I pros-
trate myself at all times." The Torah is the inherit-
ance of the Congregation of Jacob, not the possession
of a single individual, and the Rabbi is not only
responsible to his congregation, but to the whole of
Israel for its preservation and perpetuation. This
is indeed a most important principle in the democratic
constitution of Israel, which both in the State and
in the Synagogue considers the man holding a respon-
sible office the servant of the institution and not its
master. He belongs to the institution, not the
institution to him. And to be the servant of the
Torah means to labor in the Torah, to be constant
learners as long as you remain constant teachers.

And be not niggardly in these labors, even after
you have found favor with your congregation. And
be not particularly exalted by the general applause.
In fact, you ought to become a little distrustful of
yourself under such circumstances. You well know
that our ancient sages looked with some suspicion on
the over-popularity of the Rabbi with his community,
thinking as they did that it might be the result of his
failing to admonish his flock in matters of heaven.

Indeed, admonition is necessary, for we are now
in the midst of a great religious crisis, which is

RABBI AS A PERSONAL EXAMPLE 127

occupying all thoughtful minds in this country, and
for which we all are seeking a remedy. The Rabbi,
as the spiritual leader of the community, will un-
doubtedly have to take his share in this struggle
against the evils of the day, which need not be detailed
here, and from which we are all suffering. Both in
the pulpit and on the platform, you will have to raise
your voice against the evils threatening the moral
progress of a country, which, by reason of its free
institutions, its exalted position and great power and
influence, should have become the light of nations.
But you cannot rely much on your voice. A sweet
voice, a pleasant manner and agreeable gestures are
no doubt helpful to the Rabbi. So is a rich vocabu-
lary and an interesting topic. The graces of oratory
and the utmost power in your pulpit work will,
however, only then attain to real efficiency and prac-
tical results when the Rabbi not only says the right
thing, but also when he is the right thing. The right
thing the Rabbi should be is well defined by the
"Book of Saints," where we read, "The Rabbis must
be God-fearing men." Lest you th'nk the passage
just quoted a malicious innuendo on the sacred calling
you are about to enter upon, I will remind you of
another passage closely connected with it, "It is the
man who possesses the virtue of the fear of God,
whose words find a ready hearing." Tested by this
result, you will agree that this virtue is not so general
as commonly imagined. People will listen to you
willingly enough when your teaching is of a negative
nature. The applause of the world will seldom fail
you when you set out on the career of destruction

128 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

and proceed to abolish the one or the other law, and
startle the public by some sensational paradoxes
hostile to the teachings of Judaism. And the praise
of the thoughtless, carried away by the arguments
of convenience and comfort, will even give you credit
for depth of thinking and lofty spirituality.

But try only to engage in constructive work,
make the slightest attempt towards leading your
flock in the path of positive Judaism, and you will
find out soon enough how great the obstacles you will
have to conquer, and how feeble your efforts to remove
them. There you will accomplish nothing without
that quality of D*W nsiV "fear of God," begotten
by that realization of the Divine Presence which
makes the Rabbi not only a Bnn HfcO a "beautiful
expounder of the Law," but also a D^pD ntfl a
"beautiful observer of the law," which eliminates all
self and makes of man a real servant of the Lord,
ready for all sacrifice and rejoicing in it. To take
one or two concrete cases: We are all deploring the
decay of the Sabbath; we constantly preach against
it and sit in conclave trying to ward off the danger
to Judaism resulting from this desecration. But I
tell you frankly that the Rabbi who will use his
freedom of interpretation to explain the laws regarding
the Sabbath in such a way that they should not inter-
fere with his own pleasures and comforts, has no
right to admonish his flock not to make use of the
same freedom of interpretation so as to evade the
laws which interfere with their daily bread. The first
thing the Rabbi has to do is to keep the Sabbath
himself. Again, we constantly bewail the disappear-

RABBI AS A PERSONAL EXAMPLE 129

ance of the Jewish home, but the Rabbi who removes
all Jewish symbols from his house, and ignores all
the institutions making for Jewish life, is not the man
to arrest in any way the decay of Judaism, which
he is so deeply bemoaning. The first thing he will
have to do is to have a strictly Jewish home himself.
This is especially the case with the share the Rabbi
is expected to take in social questions. Nothing is
easier than to denounce others and to ' 'accelerate"
public opinion. The role of the agitator is played
to perfection easily enough. The morning papers
and the very gossip of the street furnish you with
sufficient materials. But as long as the Rabbi
himself is not free from all worldly ambition, from
all the vices of hunting after power and cheap popular-
ity, his words will not have the slightest effect. He
becomes in such cases a mere actor for the time being,
without any real concern in the tragedy which he
conjures up and impersonates.

It is recorded that when a Rabbi once asked his
colleague why miracles happened so frequently in
olden times and occur so rarely now, the answer he
received was that it was different with the men of
yore, who gave up their lives for the Sanctification
of the Name. Now, take the history of the world,
search the annals of our race, and see for yourself
whether this greatest of all miracles, the conversion
of a community to righteousness, or even the regener-
ation of a single individual, was ever effected by
oratory alone, or rather by the saintly men who
sacrificed, as just indicated, their very lives in the
service of ideas and ideals.

130 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

The fact is, we are again in need of the sprinkling
cf saints which alone possesses the secret of saving
humanity. I had occasion once to quote the saying
of our ancient sages that when the Holy One, blessed
be He, saw that the righteous were to be few, He
planted, or distributed them over the various genera-
tions. The righteous are apparently so few that even
Providence has to be economical in their use. Nor
are they of the noisy or boisterous kind. The descrip-
tion given of them is: Their life is even like that of
Moses, a continuous mourning for the glory of God
and the glory of Israel, at present obscured; a per-
petual longing for Israel's salvation, whilst their
activity forms "one long effort towards making peace
between heaven and earth. They are, again, ex-
ceedingly meek and gentle, never claiming thanks for
themselves. They come and go without creating
any disturbance, and they are exceedingly devoted
to the study of the Torah.

Indeed, there is a certain delicacy about the whole
composition of the saint which would make him rather
timid, retired within himself, and shrinking back from
contact with the many. Yet, somehow, his person
becomes the centre of all beneficial activities. Solemn,
severe and even distant as he may occasionally
appear, his love of God and his love of man is sure
to attract without any visible effort on his part, the
best and the purest among us. But even the less pure
element of society, nay, even the decadent and de-
generate, will only dread them, but they will never
hate them. Even the most abandoned can never
quite forget their heavenly descent so as to disasso-

RABBI AS A PERSONAL EXAMPLE 131

ciate themselves entirely from their pristine and native
state and hate the angels. The only misfortune
is that the evil one, as somebody put it, aware
of this weakness of ours for our original heavenly
connection, manages to appear in the disguise of an
innocent cherub.

Of supreme importance is the saint's devotion to
the study of the Law. The old maxim ascribed to
Hillel, the meekest of men, "no ignorant person can
be a saint or truly pious," remains true notwithstand-
ing the holy terror felt at it by a certain class of theo-
logians. Indeed, learning is the only safeguard
against the just-mentioned sham cherubs. Piety
without learning is apt, as is shown by the history
of so many sects, to degenerate into mere ranting,
making religion a caricature of itself. Least of all
is ignorance compatible with the office of the Jewish
minister, standing in the service of the Synagogue,
which from its very appearance on the stage of
history, proclaimed the study of the Torah as one of
its three essential institutions. It would not even
injure the Rabbi if he should from time to time engage
in some scientific work, publishing occasionally a
learned article on some historical topic, or even editing
some ancient Hebrew text — in spite of the glorious
discovery made recently that Isaiah never indulged
in such vanities as a Doctor's Thesis, and that Amos
never wrote a commentary — not even to his own
prophecies. By the way, I wish he would have done
so. It would have saved us a great deal of trouble,
and I believe a greater deal of Higher Criticism. The
author of the Book of Enoch tells us that, "it was not

132 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

intended when man was created that he should give
confirmation to his good faith with pen and ink and
such wise." This is angelic indeed, but humanly
speaking, it was intended when learned institutions
were created, that their graduates should, by some
scientific work, give confirmation of their continuing
the studies in which they were initiated by their
alma mater.

Of more consequence even to the Rabbi is the
Law-mindedness, or Law-conscience, which he will
acquire by his devotion to the study of the Torah, in
which the legal element is so strongly represented. It
is only, as I believe, by such a Law-conscience that
the world will profit most by the advice and counsel
of the Rabbi. I must explain a little more clearly.
During the recent controversy regarding the anti-race-
track bills before the Legislature, remarks were made
in the press to the effect that such laws as designed by
the Governor (Hughes) had an ' 'Oriental" air about
them. I have not the paper before me, but as far
as I can remember, the drift of the remark was that
such legislation is an infringement of Christian
liberty, and that the whole tendency to regulate con-
duct by legislation is a characteristic of Oriental
despotism, incompatible with the notion of human
dignity and self-government, as understood by the
Occidental man.

Now, it is not my intention to enter here upon
the question of Orientalism and Occidentalism. The
Occidental man seems to have entirely forgotten that
he is under indebtedness for certain spiritual pos-

RABBI AS A PERSONAL EXAMPLE 133

sessions to his brother of the Sunrise; which he cannot
repay — not even with smokeless powder or long-range
guns. Nor is it necessary for me to dwell on the merits
of this particular law now under consideration. In-
deed, with the Jew, it will in no way bear discussion.
The Jew has no other name for gambling than the
old Scriptural expression, 'H rojMP ''abomination to
the Lord." What concerns us here is the underlying
principle of Law, which divided us from the rest of
the world for more than eighteen centuries. What I
wish to impress upon you is that it is this conception
of law, of the necessity of law in the divine economy
of the universe, of the binding authority of law and
the absolute sovereignty and grace of law, that
Judaism is pre-eminently fitted to assert and to estab-
lish. Against this stronghold, the desperate assaults
of the centuries and of the creeds of the world have
dashed in vain. It is this tendency, hostile to the
principle of authority, Law and obedience, which it
will be your mission to combat. There are objects
which God hates, and there are objects which God
loves, and these objects are to the Jew formulated
into commandments, prohibitive on the one side, and
affirmative on the other, demanding implicit obedience.
God is not a mere figurehead. He not only reigns,
but governs. Everywhere — in the temple, in the
judge's seat, in the family, in the farm, and in the
market place — His Presence is felt in enforcing the
laws bearing His imprimatur, "I am the Lord, thy
God." Ethical monotheism is a splendid phrase.
Monotheism is good, but God is better. For mono-

134 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

theism savors somewhat of the abstract, of the mere
idea, a vague tendency, subject to what we are pleased
to call our freedom of interpretation. With the Jew,
God is the only reality, or, as our sublime liturgy
has it,

imp! DllDl 8113 D'pl T!

"A living and enduring terrible and exalted and holy
God." Ethics are good, but laws and commandments,
bidden and commanded by God, are better; and all
such phrases as idealism, spirituality and religiosity
will avail nothing as long as you omit to urge the great
principle that the Holy One of Israel, "in His Holiness,
gave law unto His people." Our Torah proclaimed the
love of God with heart and soul and might, and the
world accepted it as the consummation of its purpose.
It taught the love of neighbor as oneself, and the
world appropriated it as an original inspiration; but
together with this Israel proclaimed the love of law.
Psalmist and prophet add the law of love. "I hate
vain thoughts, but Thy law I love," sings the Psalmist
(Psalm 119:113), and it is through this love and
adherence to law that the love of God and the love
of fellowman is made effective. To urge this upon
your community in all its force and all its significance
seems to me the mission of the Rabbi of the present
generation. And it is only by representing this
principle of law and authority and obedience that
Judaism can again become a factor in the conversion
of the world.

LECTOR MEIR FRIEDMANN.*

IN THE death of Lector M. Friedmann, or as he
preferably signed himself in his Hebrew works,
Meir Ish Shalom (Meir, Man of Peace), Judaism has
sustained an irreparable loss. The oft-quoted excla-
mation of an ancient Rabbi at the decease of his
colleague, "When the scholar or Talmud Chacham
dies, who can furnish us with his substitute?" could
nowhere be applied with more force than to the death
which Israel is now mourning. Friedmann has no
substitute; he cannot be replaced. For, this was the
main characteristic of the man, that he never reminded
you of anyone else but himself. No school can claim
him; no party was strong enough to force on him its
label, though he came in touch with all schools and
all parties. He always remained, Meir Ish Shalom.

This independence may have been largely due to
the peculiar story of his youth. Briefly stated, it is
this. Friedmann was born in 1831 in the village of
Kraszna, district of Kashau, Hungary. Till twelve
years of age he remained in this village, where he
received his first instruction in the Talmud. He then
continued his studies in the Yeshiboth, or higher
Talmudical colleges, for which Hungary was distin-
guished at that period. Of particular importance
was the college at Unguar, where he studied under
the supervision of Rabbi Meir Eisenstadt, who was

*Paper contributed to the American Hebrew, December 11,
1908.

136 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

a distant relative of his mother. There, to use a
Talmudic expression, he saw the first sign of blessing
in his studies, but became also, through the influence
of Eisenstadt, attached to the teachings of the
mystics and the Chasidim, and spent a good deal of
his time in fasting and other ascetic practices. At
that time he also thought of emigrating to Palestine.
The Revolution of 1848, however, prevented him from
carrying out his favorite plan. At the age of sixteen
or seventeen he turned his attention to the Bible,
studying it with the aid of the German translation
and commentaries of Mendelssohn and his school.
The Shire Tifereth (a sort of Mosaide) of Wessely
became his great model for Hebrew style. At the
age of twenty he settled in Miskolcz, where he received
his first instruction in the German language, as well
as in geography from Michael Heilprin, perhaps the
same Heilprin who afterwards emigrated to this
country, in which he became so famous. His Rabbinic
diploma, of which, however, he never made any
use, preferring to settle down as a farmer, he obtained
at the age of twenty-four. A great sorrow befell him
soon, which made him leave Hungary and emigrate
to Vienna, where he arrived in the year 1858. There
he attended lectures at the University, but was about
the same time appointed Lector in Bible and various
Rabbinic studies in the Beth Hamidrash, in which
capacity he was active until his death. He also
occupied the same chair in the Israelitisch Theologische
Lehranstalt, of Vienna, which was afterwards founded.
His education was that of an autodidact, and the
influences reaching into his life of the most contra-

LECTOR MEIR FRIED MANN 137

dictory tendencies. But what would have led in any
other man of a less marked individuality to dilet-
tantism and shallowness in his studies and to deformity
in his character, blended in Friedmann to a harmo-
nious whole and developed a personality of unique
charm and originality. The Yeshiba and University
gave him erudition and method; whilst his contact
with Chasidism and his life as a farmer provided him
with a touch of saintliness and simplicity, which
became marked features of his nature.

This is not the place for an appreciation of Lector
Friedmann's scientific work. He made his first debut
with his edition of the Sifre in 1864. Hardly a year
has passed since then in which he did not enrich
Jewish literature by one contribution or another,
extending over all its departments, Bible criticism
included. Friedmann's various essays in the periodical
Beth Talmud, on the order of the Pentateuch and
on the story of the patriarchs, as well as his com-
mentary on Samuel and Judges, should be read
by everyone who would learn what a Jewish liberal
Bible criticism means. Only a few months ago he
published an old Rabbinic text, Baraitha d1 Melecheth
Hammishkan, with a critical commentary and intro-
duction. Death itself found him active in the edition
of a critical text of the Torath Kohanim, of which he
sent me several sheets already printed off. Suffice to
remark, that he was the pioneer in the art of critical
editions of Rabbinic texts, and that all his publica-
tions became a model in this respect for other workers
in the same field. His edition of the Mechilta in
particular formed an epoch in Rabbinical exegesis,

138 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

for it not only gave us the first scientific edition of
an ancient Rabbinic text, in which the Halachah is
nearly as strongly represented as the Hagada, but
in the Introduction it also revealed to us the pos-
sibilities of this ancient Midrashic literature, and its
bearing upon the exegesis of the Bible. It was also
in this Introduction that Friedmann maintained
that there existed another Mechilta composed in the
schools of Rabbi Simon ben Yochai, a forecast which
was afterwards amply verified by the importation of
Yemen MSS. and various discoveries in the Genizah.

Great, however, as he was a scholar, he was even
greater as a Jew and a man. Notwithstanding his
strict scientific methods, which demanded from him
absolute obedience to method and precision, he could
never sink his own personality to the level which turns
learning into mere manual work, keeping your note
books in good order and putting your references in
their proper places, or what some savant called,
"Zettelgelehrsamkeit." And whilst he endeavored
to elucidate the text under discussion, he would also
seek to widen your horizon in matters not strictly
connected with the subject in hand. In the labyrinth
of all references and cross-references to parallel pas-
sages, textual emendations and verbal explanations,
we are often struck by a sudden remark, introduced
usually by the words, "Thus says Meir, Man of
Peace," transferring us into quite another region,
history, Bible criticism or theology.

Nor would he ever allow you to forget that besides
using your brain as a thinking machine, you are also
possessed of a living soul, and that soul, a Jewish

LECTOR MEIR FRIED MANN 139

soul, to which he considered it his duty and his
privilege to address himself. And thus the sudden
flashes just indicated would assume occasionally a
spiritual character, something between a prayer and
a promise; as for instance, in his notes to the Pesikta
Rabbati, where at the end of a long disquisition as
to the original arrangement of his texts, he sud-
denly exclaims:

"Be not frightened at the aping religions, for
behold, all that the prophets said and what the wise
men have told relates to Israel, not to any other na-
tion. And as long as their words were not realized
in us, the sons of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, they
cannot be regarded as fulfilled. Blessed be he who hopes
and will see the days when Edom shall be a possession
and Israel shall do valiantly."

The "aping religions" are Christianity and Mo-
hammedanism, a term used sometimes by Spanish
philosophers, which Friedmann was fond of repeating.
His admirable introduction, again, to the Seder
Eliahu, forming the best essay in existence on the
Elijah legend in Hebrew literature is, at the same
time, a long learned epic, giving the story of Israel's
aspirations both as a religion revealed in its Torah,
and as a nation manifest in its eschatology. Occasion-
ally, he also seizes the opportunity to warn against
assimilation. This is especially the tendency trace-
able in his monograph on the twentieth chapter of
Ezekiel, which he published twenty years ago.
"What the elders of Israel who consulted Ezekiel
wanted," he says in effect, "was to build themselves
a Temple in Babylon, centralizing there the Jewish

140 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

worship to be performed by priests or first-born,
and thus establish there a minor sanctuary in the
midst of Babylon (as a substitute for the Temple
in Jerusalem). But it was against this which the
prophet protested so vehemently, for such a sanctuary
would lead to abandoning all thought of returning to
the Holy Land, which must end in absorption by the
surrounding nations, whose deeds they will imitate,
so that the name of God will be profaned; whilst
the real destiny of Israel was the perfection of the
nation, so that they be a separate nation in a separate
country, with God as their King."

Entertaining such sentiments, (though there are
passages in his writings which would be considered
rank heresy by the common nationalist,) it is not to be
wondered at that he was one of the first Jewish schol-
ars who approved of the Zionistic movement. Wheth-
er he ever was an active member of any Zionistic
organization, I am unable to say; but he certainly
sympathized with the movement, defending it both in
his private conversation and letters to his friends and
in public. I am especially thinking of a short article
of his in The Hashiloach, where he quotes one of
our mediaeval authorities who maintained that the
redemption which Israel is expecting now need not
necessarily be accompanied by the interference with
the laws of nature as that from Egypt was, but may
also be accomplished without the intervention of
miracles. He further quotes, in this connection, the
well-known passage from the Midrash, that God's
blessing does not relieve man from his share of activity
and effort: and proceeds to say, "This is answer

LECTOR MEIR FRIED MANN 141

enough to those in Israel who oppose the great move-
ment in our day, which, if the whole nation should
unite to aid in it, would soon bring about the ful-
filment of the Scriptural promise, That the Lord
thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hand
which thou doest!' '

'The conversation of the men of the Holy Land,"
says the Midrash, "is a Torah in itself," and so was
that of Friedmann, — instructive and suggestive. The
old adage, "Olam keminhago noheg" (the world moves
on its customary lines) was one of his favorite sayings ;
and in his simplicity of character, there was nothing
farther from him than the wish to appear soaring
above the world. I remember to have read the state-
ment of some Zadik that simplicity should be the
only object of prayer by man, and I knew many who
constantly prayed for it, but the more they prayed
the more self-conscious they became. To Friedmann,
this gift was granted without a prayer. All through
life he never assumed the role of the "winner of
souls," though his influence has reached more men
and women than that of many an official "leader of
the generation." Even towards his pupils he never
asserted the role of master. He treated them as
friends and comrades, mingling in their conversa-
tions and pastimes. Yet Friedmann could never be
commonplace, even if he wished to be; and in his
talk there would always be some striking remark,
which could only be described as a flash of genius.
It must now be more than thirty years since several
young men were gathered in his private room attached
to the Beth Hamidrash, engaged in easy talk,

142 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

when the conversation took a serious character,
turning upon the old problem of the destiny of Israel.
Those were the times when the idea of the Mission,
with its necessary consequence of Israel's final
absorption in the great sea of the nations, was regarded
as an indisputable dogma; and so it was declared to
be by the majority of those present. Whereupon
Friedmann suddenly exclaimed, "Gentlemen, this is
frog theology, and unworthy of a human being!"
After much guessing as to the meaning of his words,
it was afterwards found that he was referring to a
certain story, which may be paraphrased somewhat
in the following way: A frog challenged the accom-
plishment of David as a singer in Israel, maintaining
that its incessant croaking has a much sweeter sound,
and further alleging that it represents the martyr
animal of creation, as it never hesitates to swim in
the current carrying it to the abode of the sea-mon-
sters, to be ultimately swallowed up by a Leviathan
exclusively dependent for its sustenance on frog
food. By this, the frog asserted that its death accom-
plished the message of its Maker. No "mission talk"
of this kind was ever heard again in this circle. And
let there be no mistake about it. Friedmann was by
no means what is called "orthodox." He gave evidence
of this both in his writings and conversation. There
is the famous rebuke by him administered to a certain
extremist, "I have seen many a rnan wrapped up in
his Tallith and Tefillin, but harboring a non-Jewish
soul, and I am addressing myself only to Jewish souls."
Indeed, if anything could have provoked his wrath,
it was fanaticism and persecution, in which at those

LECTOR MEIR FRIED MANN 143

times the orthodox used to indulge more than their
opponents, — which conditions I may remark en
passant have been reversed nowadays, when the
' 'opponents" have the majority and feel strong
enough for this blessed task. But Friedmann hated
empty phrases of all kinds, while he would never allow
to pass unchallenged any stigma upon Israel — which
was his grand passion. It was in this way that he
saved many a young man both from scoffing at the
Haskalah and from the cheap platitudes of the
rationalism so rampant in the seventies.

What I owe him personally concerns the world
very little, nor have I the words at my command to
express adequately what he meant to me as a teacher
and friend for nearly forty years. Our ancient sages
say, "When one of a band (of friends) dies, let all
the surviving members feel troubled." The trouble
is not so much a consequence of fear at the approach
of one's own end, as the fact that by the loss of parents
and relatives and the dropping away of intimate
friends, life becomes constantly poorer in all that
makes life valuable and desirable. And nothing
remains but to live on memories, cherishing the
memory of this Prince in the Torah and this great
Man of Peace.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.*

A LEXANDER H. Stephens, in his characteriza-
-**> tion of Lincoln, says, "The Union with him in
sentiment rose to the sublimity of a religious mys-
ticism ; whilst his ideas of its structure and formation
in logic rested upon nothing but the subtleties of
a sophism."

Stephens was, by agreement of all, the ablest
historian of the Confederacy, and, some think, its
greatest man; and those who read his argument for
the Union contained in his address given at Milledge-
ville, Georgia, before the War between the States
began, will further admit that he had the gift of see-
ing below the surface of things, for the condition of
affairs as seen then by superficial observers was all
in favor of secession. Stephens was also one of the
few prominent men of the Thirtieth Congress for
whom Lincoln conceived great admiration during
his first appearance at Washington in the capacity
of a member of the House of Representatives. Lin-
coln was present when Stephens delivered "the best
speech of an hour's length" he had ever heard, which
moved him so deeply that his "old, withered eyes
were full of tears." At a later date, again, when Lin-
coln stood before the country as the President-elect,
Stephens was, perhaps, the only Southern statesman

""Lecture delivered on the Occasion of Lincoln's Hundreth Anni-
versary, at the Jewish Theological Seminary, February

146 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

whose opinion Lincoln solicited in reference to the
coming struggle. Some historians maintain that
Lincoln seriously considered the advisability of
inviting Stephens to become a member of his cabinet.
A characterization of Lincoln coming from such a
source is worthy of our attention. It will, therefore,
not be amiss if wre devote this hour to this trait of
religious mysticism in his character, touching also
on one or two other traits which, by their seeming
contrast, served either as a corrective or as an em-
phasis of this mystical trait.

Whether this aspect has ever been the subject
of special treatment by any other writer, I am unable
to say. The list of Lincolniana prepared by the
Library of Congress and consisting mostly of writings
relating to Lincoln, covers a large quarto volume of
eighty-six pages. This list was published in 1906,
and we may assume that the last two years have
brought us a new harvest of Lincolniana. There
you will find Lincoln as a lawyer, Lincoln as an or-
ganizer, Lincoln as an orator, Lincoln as a general,.
Lincoln as a debater, Lincoln as a master of men,
Lincoln as a financier, and ever so many more Lin-
coins. For all I know, or rather do not know, the
possibility is not excluded that in this enormous
mass of literature, Lincoln may have also been treated
from the point of view I intend to approach him this
evening. Even in this case, it may perhaps not be
entirely uninteresting to listen to one whose first
acquaintance with Lincoln was made in far-distant
Roumania through the medium of Hebrew news-
papers some forty-five years ago. There Lincoln

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 147

was described as originally a wood-chopper (prose
for "rail-splitter"), which so fired the imagination of
the lad as to recognize in the President of the United
States, a new Hillel, for legend described the latter
as having been engaged in the same occupation before
lie was called by the people to the dignity of Patriarch,
or President of the Sanhedrin. Years have come and
years have gone, and the imagination of the boy was
in many respects corrected by the reading of serious
books bearing on the history of the United States, and
particularly on that of the Civil War. But this in
no way diminished his admiration for his hero,
Abraham Lincoln, whom he was always studying,
from the viewpoint of the student of Jewish literature;
a literature which, in spite of its eastern origin,
affords so much in the way of parallel and simile to
the elucidation of the great Western of the Westerns.
The youth of Lincoln offered little or no oppor-
tunity for the display of religious mysticism. Some
historians of the high and dry kind take, as it seems,
a genuine pleasure in speaking of the surroundings
that were about Lincoln as "coarse, ignorant and
poverty-stricken." In a certain measure this is
true. Lincoln himself described the part of Indiana
in which he grew up as a "wild region, with many
bears and other animals still in the woods." The con-
ditions were thus semi-barbaric, and may be held
responsible for whatever of coarseness and uncouth-
ness respectability detected in the life of Lincoln.
Barbaric conditions, however, have the great redeem-
ing virtue that there is little room in them for vul-
garity, and this compensates for the lack of many

148 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

an accomplishment of civilization. By "vulgarity,"
I mean that vice of civilization which makes man
ashamed of himself and his next of kin, and pretend
to be somebody else. It is a kind of social hypocrisy,
and not less pernicious to the development of char-
acter than religious hypocrisy to the development
of saintliness. With Lincoln in particular, such
simulation to which we are broken in, consciously or
unconsciously, in a great civilized community, would
have proven fatal, as his great strength lay in the fact
that he always remained himself, or, as one of his
eulogists aptly said: "Lincoln is not a type. He
stands alone — no ancestors, no fellows, no successors."
More serious, perhaps, is the charge of ignorance.
In the biography for the Directory of Congress,
Lincoln gave himself the mark, "education defective."
Learned institutions of any kind were almost un-
known in those regions. "If a straggler supposed to
understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neigh-
borhood, he was looked upon as a wizard." But even
books, which have wrought so many miracles in pav-
ing the way for many a self-taught man, leading to
the highest academic honors, were scarce. The whole
settlement in which Lincoln spent the greatest part
of his early youth, could hardly have commanded
such a library as any youngster in our days, even
among the poorer classes, might look upon as his
property on the day of his confirmation. Even the
itinerant ministers of religion who would occasionally
visit these pioneer settlements were less distinguished
for their sources of information than for their forcible
language, well spiced with brimstone and other

ABRAHA M LINCOLN 149

nether-world ingredients. But, as has already been
pointed out by several biographers of Lincoln, there
is no cause to remonstrate with Providence on this
account. For the few books which Lincoln might
regard as his own, so that he could pore over them
day and night, were of the best kind, being the Bible,
Aesop's Fables, Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress
and Weems' Life of Washington." All these works
left a permanent impression upon him, which is
traceable in the simplicity of his lucid style, and in
his love of fable and parable as a means of illustrating
a point. Shakespeare and a few other English poets
with whom he made acquaintance at a somewhat
later date, may be added to this list. Perhaps it
would have been better for Lincoln's reputation if
Lincoln's youth, which brought him to Illinois,
where he came in contact with a more advanced
civilization, would in respect of book learning, have
not gone much further beyond the books or kind of
books just mentioned — in addition, of course, to
such works on the history and the Constitution of
the United States, as were necessary for his mental
equipment in his future career as lawyer and states-
man. For those were the days in which Volney's
Ruins and Tom Paine's Age of Reason were taken
as seriously and read with as much eagerness as a
certain class of books dabbling in evolution and the
survival of the fittest — pulpit evolution, we might
term it — are read and discussed today. Lincoln in
his zeal for knowledge did not escape the tendency
of his age, and in impulsive moments gave expression
to certain rationalistic views which were afterwards

150 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

seized upon with much avidity by friend and foe as
representing "the true Lincoln." The student of
Hebrew literature, when reading such "Lincolns,"
emphasizing the shortcomings of his youth and the
lack of presentable ancestry, involuntarily thinks of
the ancient Rabbinic but truly democratic principle:
"They appoint not a leader over the community un-
less there hangs a mass of reptiles (in the shape of
certain blemishes) behind him, lest he become over-
bearing." Some writers apparently mistake the
reptiles for an essential part of the man.

Lincoln outgrew all his puerile rationalistic per-
formances soon enough when the time for such action
came as could never have been accomplished without
faith, in all its sublimity. This action was the saving
of the Union, which was at the same time the great
opportunity of his life, and unfortunately also the
occasion of his death. No religious hero ever entered
upon his mission to conquer the world for an idea or
creed with more reverence and a deeper feeling of the
need of divine assistance than did Lincoln, when he
was about to leave his home and his old associates
and associations, good and evil, for his new home and
his new life in Washington. "I now leave," he said
in his farewell address to his fellow citizens at Spring-
field, Illinois, "not knowing when or whether I may
return, with a task before me greater than that which
rested upon Washington. Without the assistance
of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I can-
not succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail.
Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain
with you, and be everywhere for good, let us con-

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 151

fidently hope that all will yet be well." This sounds
like a prayer; but the concluding line of his In-
augural, given in Washington on the 4th of March,
1861, rise to the heights of a mystical hymn.

"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not
be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it
must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic
cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield
and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-
stone aU over this broad land, will yet swell the
chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely
they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

"Higher criticism" attributes these lines to a
suggestion of Seward, but it was Lincoln, as admitted
even by the "higher critics," who gave them life and
spirit and who transformed them into an illustration
of perfect and tender beauty.

The expression, "mystic chords of memory" is
significant. Napoleon the Great is recorded to have
once made the apt remark, "Religion means memory."
If the Union was to be saved, it had to be raised to
the dignity of a religion, which means memory, an
object hallowed by past associations, which alone
holds out promises for the future. Notwithstanding
all realistic conceptions of history, the "better angels
of our nature" that alone terminate great issues by
their readiness for sacrifice, will never enlist in a cause
purely material. The better angels fought for the
shrine of their gods; for the expansion of a religious
idea of which they were possessed ; for their existence
as a nation — that is, their institutions, their language,
their literature, their traditional customs and usages;

152 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

for glory and honor — in brief, for their memories;
though gold and other material gains always proved
a valuable auxiliary as attracting the minor angels.
In the case of America, the Western man might
struggle for an outlet to the Gulf, the Eastern man
might contend for the protection of infant industries,
but to engage in a war of such dimensions as the
Civil War was, with its loss of men and loss of treas-
ure, the dynamis of an idea and ideal was indis-
pensable. And this idea, denned by the word "Un-
ion," was to all intents and purposes a mystical one,
as every religious idea is. The State, reaching
directly into the life of the citizen through the means
of its courts," its schools and its powers of direct
taxation, was something concrete and tangible,
evident to the dullest intellect in its distribution of
reward and punishment, and realized as the tutelar
deity of the community. On the other hand, the
benefits of the Central Government were, as Stephens
rightly pointed out, so silent and unseen, that they
were seldom thought of or appreciated, just as is the
oxygen in the air we breathe little thought of or
appreciated, although it is the very element that gives
us life and strength. Hence, the Union was a mere
abstraction, invisible, an hypostasis of memory and
hope, and appealing only to our sense of reverence
and worship or "the better angels of our nature."

The realization of great ideas, heaven-conceived
and earth-born, is not accomplished without travail
and woe, deep sorrow and repeated disappointment.
History of things past, and apocalyptic pictures of
events to come, furnish sufficient proof of this. And

ABRAHA M LINCOLN 153

such was the case with the idea of the Union before
it could pass into the consciousness of the people as a
solemn fact. The effect of the first Union defeats
upon the great persons of Washington and their
entourage is recorded by Walt Whitman as "a
mixture of awful consternation, uncertainty, rage,
shame, helplessness and stupefying disappointment."
Lincoln himself was no exception in this respect,
though his calm disposition preserved him from
"rage." His sublime faith, again, in the cause of
the Union which, in the manner of a Luther at the
Diet of Worms, he considered to be God's cause,
made real despair impossible. But this confidence
did not exclude moments of terrible anguish and
intense suffering. At times of frightful suspense,
he would envy the common soldier, and would will-
ingly have exchanged places with him, whilst after
the terrible defeat of the Union forces at Fredericks-
burg, he exclaimed: "Oh, if there is a man out of
hell that suffers more than I do, I pity him!" His
normal condition may be described as expectation
inspired by the sense of the awful. It is well depicted
in the answer given by him to a delegation of ministers
importuning him with their well-meant counsel; and
probably reflects his own mental attitude: "Gentle-
men," he said, "suppose all the property you possess
were in gold, and you had placed it in the hands of
Blondin to carry across the Niagara River on a rope.
With slow, cautious, steady steps he walks the rope,
bearing your all. Would you shake the cable and
keep shouting to him, 'Blondin, stand up a little
straighter! Blondin, stoop a little more; go a little

154 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

faster; lean more to the south! Now lean a little
more to the north!' Would that be your behaviour
in such an emergency? No! You would hold your
breath, everyone of you, as well as your tongues.
You would keep your hands off until he was safe
on the other side." This simile is rather homely in
its local color, but it struck me as peculiarly forcible
many years ago, long before I had ever seen Niagara
Falls or ever heard of Blondin and his performances.
It somehow sounded to me like an echo from the
following passage to be found in Bedresi's Examina-
tion of the World, that may be paraphrased thus:
"The World is a stormy sea, of depth immeasurable
and expanse unbounded. Time is a frail bridge built
over it. The one end is fastened by cords to the
Vast that precedes existence, and its terminus gives
glimpses of eternal glory through the light of the
presence of the King. The width of the bridge is
as a man's cubit, and the rails have disappeared.
But thou, Son of Man, without thy consent, thou
livest and continuously dost progress over it from
the day of thy birth. When thou meditatest upon
the narrowness of the span, having no side path
either to the right or to the left, when thou perceivest
death and destruction encompassing thee as a wall
on either side, will not thy heart fail, and wilt thou
still glory in power and fame?" Bedresi flourished
in the thirteenth century, and his book was written
in Hebrew, and I hardly need say that Lincoln never
as much as even heard of it.

With the consciousness of the Union, or the body-
politic, there developed in Lincoln also the conscious-

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 155

ness of the national sin, and the need of confession,
which indeed is another manifestation of religious
mysticism. Renan, in his famous review of Amiel's
Journal, remarks: "He (Amiel) speaks of sin, of
salvation, etc., as though they were realities. Sin in
particular, engrosses his attention and saddens him."
Sin was also a reality with Lincoln, weighing heavily
on his conscience, not to be countenanced on any
aesthetic considerations or argued away by any philo-
sophic or sociological formula. There it was, and it
cried for atonement. Thus, in one of his proclama-
tions, he addresses the nation in the following words:
"We have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no
other nation has ever grown; but we have forgotten

God We have been the recipients of the

choicest bounties of heaven. Intoxicated by unbroken
success, we have become . . . too proud to pray
to the God that made us. We have been preserved
these many years in peace and prosperity. It behooves
us, then, .... to confess our national sins,
and to pray for clemency and forgiveness." The
plural "we" in these proclamations is to be taken
literally to include the North, whom he by no means
acquitted of the great national sin. "If God wills,"
he wrote once, "the removal of a great wrong, and
wills also that we of the North, as well as you of the
South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that
wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause
to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God."
And in the nation he included fully his own person.
He is even said to have exclaimed once in a moment
of deep depression, "If our American society and the

156 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

United States Government are demoralized and
overthrown, it will come from the voracious desire
for office, this wriggle to live without toil, work and
labor, from which I am not free myself."

The greatest human and at the same time religious
document, however, left us by Lincoln, for which
history hardly affords any model, except perhaps that
of the Scriptures is, as is well known, his Second
Inaugural: ' The Almighty has His own purpose.
Woe unto the world because of offense; for it must
needs be that offenses come ; but woe to that man by
whom the offense cometh.' If we shall suppose that
American slavery is one of those offenses which, in
the providence of God must needs come, but which,
having continued through His appointed time, He
now wills to remove, and that He gives to both
North and South this terrible war as the woe due to
those by whom the offense came, shall we discern
therein any departure from the divine attributes
which the believers in a living God always ascribe
to him? Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray —
that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass
away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all
the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred
and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and
until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall
be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said
three thousand years ago, so still it must be said:
The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous
altogether.' '

When reading these lines just given, one can
scarcely believe that they formed a part of a message

ABRAHA M LINCOLN 157

addressed in the nineteenth century to an assembly
composed largely of men of affairs and representatives
of a special political party, surrounded by all the
pomp and paraphernalia of one of the greatest
legislative bodies the world has ever seen. One
rather imagines himself transported into a camp of
contrite sinners determined to leave the world and its
vanities behind them, possessed of no other thought
but that of reconciliation with their God, and ad-
dressed by their leader when about to set out on a
course of penance. Indeed, how little the religious
sentiments manifest in this document echoed those
of either party is evident from a letter of Lincoln to
Thurlow Weed, with reference to the Second In-
augural: ". . . . I believe it is not immediately
popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that
there has been a difference of purpose between the
Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this
case, is to deny that there is a God governing the
world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be
told, and, as whatever of humiliation there is in it
falls most directly on myself, I thought others might
afford for me to tell it." To take upon one's self
the burden of humiliation in which the whole nation
should share, is another feature of religious mysticism
which so vividly realizes in the sphere of morality
the unity of humanity, and in the realm of history the
union of the nation, so that it does not hesitate to
suffer and to atone for the sins of the generation.

Religious mysticism, however, has the defects of
its quality, and the defects are very serious. For,
the superabundance of zeal and extravagant enthu-

158 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

siasm such as often accompany religious mysticism
may, as experience teaches, very easily degenerate
into fanaticism and lawlessness, brushing aside all
legal restraints and occasionally ignoring even all
humane considerations. From these dangers, Lin-
coln was preserved by his legal training and not less
by his divine humor.

Many writers have shown what Lincoln's experi-
ence at the bar meant for him in his later historic
guidance of the nation. But the best gift these
twenty-three years in the legal profession brought him
was that it created in him a legal conscience, which
proved immune against the possible excesses of
mysticism. He certainly considered slavery as the
sin, par excellence. "If slavery is not wrong, nothing
is wrong," and to this conviction of the wrong of
slavery, statements may be quoted dating from his
earliest manhood. About this fact all the best author-
ities are agreed now, whatever doubts there may
have been expressed concerning it a generation ago,
and there is no necessity to adduce here more proofs.
But he was equally convinced of the supremacy of
the law, as embodied in the Constitution, its author-
ized interpretations, and the enactments made under
its provisions. Liberty is sacred, but so is the Consti-
tution, the sacred writ of the United States, and in
opposition to the most distinguished of his colleagues,
he was loath to agree that it can be ruled out of court
by the "higher law," or the "unwritten law." "Let
every American," he exclaimed in one of his earlier
speeches, "every lover of liberty, every well-wisher

ABRA HA M LINCOLN 1 59

to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution
never to violate in the least particular the laws of
the country, and never to tolerate their violation
by others." Indeed, he considered "the increasing
disregard of the law which pervaded the country
as something of ill omen — the growing disposition
to substitute the wild and curious passions in lieu
of the sober judgments of the courts, and the worse
than savage mobs for the executive ministers of
justice." The passages just quoted are taken from
an address given by Lincoln in January, 1837, when
he was fully engaged in his profession as a lawyer.
But this conviction of the sovereignty of the law,
grows upon him with the growth of his personality
and the growth of the temptation to break it. He
is ' 'naturally anti-slavery," as he expressed it, and is
the more on his guard not to follow the bent of his
nature. And the temptation was great indeed, when
we consider not only his own inclination, but the general
tendency of several of the leaders of his own party,
to think lightly of the Constitution, a tendency ex-
pressed in Stanton's well-known words: "It is
better to have a country without a Constitution than
a Constitution without a country." It is further
clear from Lincoln's famous letter to Hodges that
he shared to some degree in this feeling. Yet he
remained steadfast to his legal principles. He
admitted that there is such a thing as "bad laws,"
but the only remedy he saw was that they "should
be repealed as soon as possible; as long as they con-
tinue in force, they should be religiously observed."

1 60 SEMI N A RY A D DRESSES

Hence his well-known hesitation to emancipate the
slave, and his recurring to it in the end only as a
measure of war, which he thought justified by the
Constitution.

This legal conscience found a powerful ally in
Lincoln's humor. No flaw in an argument could
elude it, no human weakness in either party could
escape it, but it possessed also that divine quality
of wounding and healing at the same time, which
made it with no real malice to anyone and charitable
in the end to others.

Nothing is more congenial to the student of Jewish
literature than these ingredients in Lindoln's mental
make-up which found their expression in his stories,
his repartee, his wit and sarcasm, in all of which he
was such a consummate master. In the literature of
the Jew, the Mashal (comparison) or Maaseh (story)
are the most prominent. They were mostly used by
way of illustration. The use of the Mashal in par-
ticular, is illustrated by the Rabbis by another
"mashal" comparing it to the handle which enables
people to take hold of a thing or subject. Occasionally
it forms the introduction to the most solemn dis-
course. Thus it is recorded of a famous Rabbi that
before he commenced his lectures on points of law
before his disciples, he would first tell them something
humorous to make them laugh, and then, resuming
his natural self, commenced in solemn frame of mind
his discourse. I need hardly remind you here of the
well-known tradition in connection with the Presi-
dent's first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation
to the members of his cabinet (September 22, 1862).
They met in his office at the White House, and then

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 161

took their seats in the usual order. Lincoln then took
Artemus Ward's book, and read from it the chapter,
"High-Handed Outrage at Utica," which he thought
very funny, and enjoyed the reading of it greatly,
while the members of the cabinet, except Stanton,
laughed with him. Then he fell into a grave tone and
began the discussion preceding the perusal of this
great historical and momentous document.

To give another example: Once when a Rabbi
wanted to impress his audience with the evil conse-
quences of intemperance, he began: "Story: Once
upon a time there was a pious man whose father was
addicted to strong drink, which brought great shame
upon him. On one occasion, the pious man walked
in the street in a pouring rain, when he perceived a
drunken man lying in the gutter and exposed to the
abuse of the street urchins, who made sport of him.
He thereupon thought in his heart, 'I will induce
father to come here to show him the humiliation he
brings upon himself by his dissipation.' The father
came, but the first thing he did was to ask the drunken
man for the address of the inn where such good wine
was sold." This recalls to our mind Lincoln's well-
known answer to the charge brought against one of
his most successful generals that he sometimes drank
too much. Lincoln merely asked to know the brand
of whiskey consumed by him so that he "might
distribute it among some of the other generals."
Lincoln's pleading with his friends and foes that there
is no hope for Americans to live outside of the Consti-
tution if they cannot any longer live in it (I am unable
to locate the passage or to give the exact words)
reminded me when I read it of the following Jewish

162 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

parable: "Once upon a time, a fox was walking by
the banks of a river, and he saw the fish swimming
from place to place. 'Why this unrest?' asked the
fox. The fish answered, 'Because of the nets spread
out for us by the sons of men.' Thereupon the fox
said, 'Would you not prefer to move to the land and
I and you will live together, as my ancestors and yours
did before us?' The fish answered, 'Art thou the one
who is spoken of as the sage among the animals?
Thou art a fool. If, in our element of life we cannot
always escape danger, the less so in the element that
means death for us.' '

Lincoln's humor not only served him as a means of
instruction and illustration, but proved also an ex-
cellent weapon of offense and defence. You have all
probably heard the story which he told once when dis-
cussing the newspaper attacks on his administration,
emanating from the various quarters which agreed
in nothing except their hostility to the President:

"A traveler on the frontier found himself out of
his reckoning one night in a most inhospitable region.
A terrific thunderstorm came up, to add to his
trouble. He floundered along until at length his
horse gave out. The lightning afforded him the only
clue to his way, but the peals of thunder were fright-
ful. One bolt, which seemed to crush the earth
beneath him, brought him to his knees. By no means
a praying man, his petition was short and to the point:
'O Lord, if it's all the same to you, give us a little
more light and a little less noise."

The noise indeed was terrific and light was neces-
sary. I once read a remark that every great move-

ABRA HA M LINCOLN 1 63

ment is liable to suffer not less by the arrogance of
the few than by the ignorance of the many. The
many in this case were the people at large who, in
their slow and sluggish way, could be moved by the
sequence of events under the tuition of such a master
mind as Lincoln. More hopeless was the case of the
few who looked upon themselves as the elect, and
neither minded nor cared for the people behind them.
These self-constituted advisers did not take into
consideration that there were such things as a Con-
stitution and Constitutional guarantees, which as
the sworn officer of the law Lincoln could not possibly
ignore. They were always ready with their counsel
to Lincoln, and even the logic of events never cured
them of their dogmatism and positiveness. Only
lately, I read a book by one of these elect, written
more than a generation after Lincoln's death, in
which the impression is conveyed that the Civil War
might have been easily averted had the President
but followed the advice offered to him by the writer
and his friends.

"And this reminds me of a story," to use a favorite
expression of Lincoln. I give the story in the pe-
culiar version I heard it once from "one who tells"
(Maggid), though the main features of it are known
from the Midrashim and the Pseudepigrapha, not to
mention Milton's "Paradise Lost." "When the
Holy One, blessed be He, was about to create man,
He invited the angels and asked them for their
opinion. Their answer was, 'Let man not be created,
for he will prove a sinful creature.' And so indeed
it came to pass, 'that the wickedness of man was

164 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

upon the earth.' Then they came to God and said,
'We told you so!' The Lord's answer was, 'If you
are so self-righteous, descend to the earth and see
whether with all your heavenly bringing up you will
turn out less proof against sin than man?' A certain
number of angels did descend to earth, where they
made the acquaintance of the daughters of man,
'and brought forth the generation of giants, men of
renown.' But the great majority of the angels
withdrew in a sullen mood to a remote corner of
heaven, eternally absorbed in the admiration of their
own virtue which prevented them from begetting giants
and men of renown, and continuing out of sheer habit
to sing the praise, not of God, but of themselves."

The counterpart of this celestial coterie is known
on earth under various appellatives bestowed upon
them by themselves, such as "illuminati," "elect,"
"seekers after perfection," etc., and the only way
to meet them is with humor in its various aspects.
Serious argument is of little use on such occasions,
for they appeal to the will of God, "which prevails,"
and should be indeed the last appeal in all matters;
but it never occurs to them that there is a possibility
that they are not the chosen vessels for this revelation
of the will of God. As Lincoln expressed it, "There
is certainly no contending against the will of God,
but still there is some difficulty in ascertaining and
applying it to particular cases." How he dealt with
the "certain ones" may be best illustrated by the
following episode:

A member of a church, at a reception, closed his
remarks with the pious hope "that the Lord is on our

ABRAHA M LINCOLN 165

side." "I am not at all concerned about that," com-
mented the President, "for we know that the Lord is
always on the side of the right. But it is my constant
anxiety and prayer that I and the nation should
be on the Lord's side."

This suspicion against overzeal, which might make
it possible for man not to be on the Lord's side even
when in the service of a righteous cause, is one against
which man has constantly to be on his guard. Even
Elijah, according to Rabbinic legend, received a
rebuke when he exclaimed, "I have been very jealous
for the Lord God of Hosts." And it was intimated
to him from heaven that there is just a possibility
that it is his own person for which he shows so much
zeal. This is indeed the great danger of every mis-
sion of this nature, that man is very often liable to
confuse his own cause with that of God. I remember
to have read somewhere a conversation between two
American statesmen. In the heat of the argument the
one quoted the well-known dictum of Johnson,
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." Where-
upon, the other retorted, "Sir, you overlook the pos-
sibilities of reform and progress." The history of
Reconstruction unfortunately showed that the retort
was not without a grain of truth.

Even more characteristic is Lincoln's answer given
to a delegation of ministers from Chicago, urging him
to issue a Proclamation of Emancipation before he
considered it fit to do so. One of the ministers felt
it his duty to make a more searching appeal to the
President's conscience. Just as they were retiring,
he turned and said to Lincoln: "What you have said

1 66 SEMI N A RY A D DRESSES

to us, Mr. President, compels me to say to you in
reply that it is a message to you from our Divine
Master, through me, commanding you, sir, to open
the doors of bondage, that the slave may go free!"
Generally, "the master of men" followed the counsel
of old sages, listening politely to every advice offered
to him and deciding as seemed to him best:

Listen to every counsel,

And the best of them choose,

And make the counsel of thy heart to stand;

For there is none more faithful unto thee than it.

But he had little patience with dogmatism of the
kind just cited, and his answer was: "That may be,
sir, for I have studied this question by night and by
day, for weeks and for months, but if it is, as you say,
a message from your Divine Master, is it not odd that
the only channel He could send it by was that round-
about route by way of that awful wicked city of
Chicago?" This is the version given by Schuyler
Colfax in his "Reminiscences" of Lincoln, but there
is also another version of it, in which the uncharitable
remark about the metropolis of the West is omitted.
It reads: "I hope it will not be irreverent for me to
say that if it is probable that God would reveal His
will to others on a point so connected with my duty,
it might be supposed He would reveal it directly to
me. . . . Whatever shall appear to be God's
will, I will do." The fact is Lincoln recognized no
other medium for this divine revelation than "the
will of the people, constitutionally expressed, which
is the ultimate law for all." This is indeed the
"mystery of democracy, or sentiment of the equality

ABRA HA M LINCOLN 167

before God of all His creatures," which assumes that
all the world's people are prophets, but at the same
time perceives in the Constitution of the United
States the best guarantee against false prophets.

As far as Lincoln himself is concerned, all the false
prophets have disappeared, for indeed there were
false prophets both among the Republicans and the
Democrats who predicted most dire consequences
from Lincoln's election. In a letter to General J.
M. Schofield, who had to contend so much with
the various factions within the Republican Party
itself, Lincoln wrote, "If both factions, or neither,
shall abuse you, you will probably be about right.
Beware of being assailed by one and praised by the
other." Lincoln passed through both stages, having
been first assailed by all parties, and now praised
by all, even by many eminent Southerners who do
not fail to recognize his greatness. And thus he is
doubly right.

The half century that has wellnigh elapsed since
his death has dispelled the mists that encompassed
him on earth. Men now not only recognize the right
which he championed, but behold in him the standard
of righteousness, of liberty, of conciliation and truth.
In him, as it were personified, stands the Union, all
that is best and noblest and enduring in its principles,
in which he devoutly believed and strove mightily to
save. When today, the world celebrates the century
of his existence, he has become the ideal of both
North and South, of a common country, composed
not only of the factions that once confronted each other
in war's dreadful array, but of the myriad thousands

168 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

that have since found in the American nation the
hope of the future and the refuge from age-entrenched
wrong and absolution. To them Lincoln, his life,
his history, his character, his entire personality,
with all its wondrous charm and grace, its sobriety,
patience, self-abnegation and sweetness, has come to
be the very prototype of a rising humanity.

A certain Jewish saint who had the misfortune to
survive the death of his greatest disciple, is recorded
to have exclaimed: "O Lord, thou shouldst be grate-
ful to me that I have trained for Thee so noble a soul."
This is somewhat too bold, but we may be grateful
to God for having given us such a great soul as Lin-
coln, "who, under God, gave this nation a new birth
of freedom," and to our dear country, which by its
institutions and its people rendered possible the great-
ness for which Abraham Lincoln shall stand forever.

BENNO BADT.*

THE death of Professor Doctor Benno Badt,
which occurred on the 16th of April, 1909,
will be felt as an irreparable loss by the Breslau com-
munity, and not less by his numerous friends on both
sides of the Atlantic.

Doctor Badt was born in the year 1844 at Schwer-
senk, in the Grand-Duchy of Posen, but he emi-
grated at a very early age to Breslau, the capital of
Prussian Silesia. There he took up a double course
of studies, secular and theological; the former at
the gymnasium and university, the latter at the
Jewish Theological Seminary of that city. From
both these institutions he graduated with distinction.
The guiding spirit of the Breslau Seminary at that
period was its famous director, R. Zecharias Frankel,
assisted by such men of renown as Graetz, Bernays and
Joel. Badt, however, never made use of his Rabbinic
diploma, his preference having been for the scholastic
career. He thus entered the Johannes Gymnasium
as instructor, where in due course of time he was
promoted to the rank of Oberlehrer, and then to that
of Professor, which office he held to the end of his
life. The subjects on which he lectured were the
classical languages, Greek and Latin. He was also
a fine English scholar, and, if I am not mistaken, he
gave instruction in that language for some time.

But though he refused to make a profession of
*Paper contributed to the American Hebrew, May 7, 1909.

170 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

the Rabbinate, he remained a Rabbi all his life in
the best sense of this term. When the authorities
of the Seminary remonstrated with him for declining
to accept a call from a congregation, he is reputed to
have answered that he chose to remain a "Welt-
priester" (lay brother), in which capacity he might
accomplish more good. And so he did. Though
moving largely, by reason of his profession, in a pagan
world, he reserved in it a small corner sacred to his
favorite subject, closely bordering on Jewish litera-
ture. I refer to his Hellenistic studies, in which Jew
and pagan meet so closely, and in which he was con-
sidered a specialist. The results of these studies
were given to the world in his various treatises on
the Sybilline Oracles. Only a few months ago he
published an excellent translation of Philo's Vita
Mosis, equipped with a scientific apparatus of the
highest order. But this was only a small fraction
of what he could do and might have done, had his
professional duties not been of so absorbing a nature.
Both in his conversation and in his correspondence he
would dwell with intense expectancy on the time when
circumstances would enable him to retire from his
post in the Gymnasium in order to devote himself
entirely to the study of his favorite subject.

He was also greatly interested in the problem of
religious education, to the solution of which he con-
tributed both by direct teaching in religious schools
and by many an essay in various pedagogic period-
icals and societies. His' "Kinderbibel" for use at
home and in school is, as I understand, one of the

BEN NO BADT 171

most popular books of this kind in Germany. As
to his Richtung (religious views), he remained, in
spite of all his devotion to Hellenistic literature, a
staunch conservative Jew all his life. Or perhaps it
was because of this devotion that he was a Conserva-
tive Jew, as was the case with many a Jewish savant
that made a specialty of the Septuagint, Philo and the
cognate productions of Alexandrian Judaism. Hel-
lenism is certainly one of the most important phe-
nomena in our history, but if it teaches anything in
the way of a practical lesson, it is that any attempt
to dispense with the sacred language and to emphasize
the universal elements at the expense of the ceremonial
law and its national aspect, must result in disaster.
The center of gravity of Judaism must remain in
Judaism, and may never be placed outside of it.

Besides his scholarly pursuits, he was also one of
the most active men in the Breslau Jewish community.
He served on the Board of Jewish Representatives of
that city, where he always both urged and enforced
the claims of the conservative section of the com-
munity. Charity was a specialty of his: he was very
liberal in his contributions to every worthy cause,
and, what was more, he made others imitate his
example, for which his position as committeeman on
various philanthropic societies of Breslau gave him
ample opportunity. Struggling students repaired
to him freely, and were sure of being received hos-
pitably. He was always ready to accord them advice
and even material support. For all sorts of men of
intelligence, taste and culture his house was a favorite

172 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

rendezvous, and they accounted it a privilege and a
delight to spend an evening in his company and the
company of his accomplished wife.

But better than all his activities was Badt him-
self. To know Badt was to love and to honor him.
This was the case both with Jew and Christian,
liberal or conservative. He was held in high esteem
by the whole community, and deeply revered by his
colleagues and pupils. Indeed, his love of truth
was proverbial in Breslau. I am convinced, and so
I am sure are all who knew him, that he would rather
have suffered martyrdom than speak or even think
an untruth. For he was, indeed, "a man who feared
God as well in private as in public, acknowledged
the truth and spake truth in his heart."

The story is told of a Rabbi, who paid a visit to
a friend on his sickbed, that he suddenly broke out
in tears. "I cry," he said, "over that beauty, that it
should rot in the dust." A more beautiful soul than
Badt, more noble, more upright, more Jewish, has
rarely been among us, and this soul beautified and
ennobled and hallowed many another soul with
which it came in closer contact. And they all will
join in the cry coming from Breslau, and mingle their
tears with those shed by his friends and pupils. They
will bless the hour that brought them in touch with
Badt, and will cherish his memory until they them-
selves become a memory.

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133

THE BEGINNINGS OF JEWISH
"WISSENCHAFT."*

SEVERAL years ago, when Death began to reap
his harvest among the ancient masters of Jewish
learning, I happened to attend a gathering of stu-
dents, all of whom acknowledged themselves as the
disciples of Zunz, Graetz, Geiger, Frankel, and their
colleagues. They had assembled with the purpose
of holding a sort of informal memorial service, in
memory of these great men. I say "informal," be-
cause, instead of commencing with eloquent addresses,
enlarging on the merits of the departed, the meeting
opened with a long silence. I must further state
that these students belonged to a school which held
the most peculiar views. For instance, Wellhausen
was not considered by them as the oracle in problems
bearing upon the rise and development of Jewish
sects, nor were for them the views of Schuerer and
Bousset decisive in questions relating to Rabbinism.
They had even their doubts as to the infallibility of
Protestant encyclopedias in matters bearing upon
Jewish history and Jewish theology; they were old-
fashioned enough to prefer consulting, in all these
matters, such authorities as were able to derive their
information from the Hebrew sources in the original

*Lecture forming the first of a series of ten Lectures on the
Genizah, delivered at the Dropsie College, Philadelphia,
1910. It appears here in expanded form.

1 74 SEMI N A RY A D DRESSES

and did actually read them before passing judgment
upon their importance or worthlessness. They were
thus, in their researches, mainly dependent upon
those whose disappearance left them, to use the old
Talmudic expression, an "orphaned generation."
The mourning was sincere and too deep for words,
and the assembly abandoned itself to contemplation,
or rather to brooding over its great losses.

The silence, however, was soon broken by a re-
mark coming from the Nestor of the gathering,
running as follows: "True, my friends, the loss of
these masters is irreparable, but, forget not that
their work was completely done, to which they could
not have added even if a longer life had been granted
to them. Life was not any more worth living for
them. Our libraries have already been explored;
our manuscripts have already been examined; our
catalogues have already been compiled; our history
has already been written ; our liturgy has already been
described, and the greatest part of the Talmud and
the Midrashim have already been scientifically edited.
The records of the past are now a matter of the past.
The future affords little scope for learned research."
These words were meant as a tribute to the dead, and
not less as a consolation to the living. But the
speaker proved to be rather a Job's comforter,
implying, as his words did, that those of the younger
generation had better abdicate their scholarly activity,
and wait patiently for absorption into the great
"intellectual All" — or, perhaps, betake themselves
into the region of "Latter-day Seers and Prophets."

BEGINNINGS OF JEWISH WISSENSCHAFT 175

A heated discussion then ensued, some siding with
the speaker, others contesting the truth of his sweep-
ing statement.

The arguments of the speaker were largely of a
statistical nature. He pointed proudly at the stately
arrays of shelves, accommodating a large number of
volumes, which, for want of some better term, may be
roughly comprised under the designation of Judaica,
and certainly imposing by their quantity; as to
quality, suffice it to mention that they included such
works as Zunz's Gottesdienstlichen Vortroege, Fraenkel's
Introductions to the Mishna and the Talmud of Jeru-
salem, Geiger's Urschrift, Graetz's History, and
Steinschneider's Catalogue of the Bodleian Library.
If we further add the great number of dissertations
on Jewish topics, and the larger number of articles
scattered over various periodicals, which together
embrace almost all departments of Jewish Wissen-
schaft, we shall recognize at once the force of the
argument of our pessimistic speaker. Yet, he was
entirely wrong in his conclusions. Like all statis-
ticians, he was too much impressed by numbers, and,
as a pessimist, he had no eye for the future with its
glorious possibilities.

The growth of Jewish Wissenschaft is a matter of
comparatively recent date, going back only a few
generations. This does not imply that Jewish
Wissenschaft is, as some claim, a product of the
Reform or Rationalistic movement in Judaism.
Rationalism, as history testifies, has never proved a
real friend to learning. It has little desire for the

176 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

opinions of the ancients; and it is amply satisfied
with its five- or eight-cubit library, in which there is
hardly room for the Bible, and certainly none for the
vast literature which the Bible has produced. In its
initial stages, while public opinion was still anxious
for precedent and authority, it may sometimes have
enlisted Wissenschaft as its auxiliary; but it emanci-
pated itself from it soon enough, as from a useless
burden, when the people became callous and indiffer-
ent and put their Judaism into the hands of a receiver.
It may further be pointed out that the masters of
Jewish learning were not slow to see that the Ration-
alistic or Reform movement was not always a very
trustworthy ally. Any one who doubts this might
pause to ask himself how it came to pass that such
men as Krochmal, Rappaport, Zunz, Frankel, Sachs,
Jacob Bernays, Luzzatto, Chayess, Joel, Graetz,
Steinschneider and a host of others, were either
directly hostile to this movement, or abandoned it
after a short connection, or at least remained entirely
indifferent to its claims. If a census should be taken
of all those who made their mark in any department
of Jewish learning by a really original contribution —
I am not speaking of dilettanti and journalists — it
would be found that at least 90 per cent, were either
directly opposed to the Reform movement, or ignored
its existence altogether. Did Jewish students as
early as the middle of the last century foresee, per-
haps, that "modernity," notwithstanding its "en-
thusiasm about the study of the sources," would in
the end prove a menace to learning, which it really

BEGINNINGS OF JEWISH WISSENSCHAFT 177

is in our days, parading its contempt of all scholar-
ship, just as the Chasidim did at an early period of
their existence?

As a fact, the study of the sources did not yield
the results which the Reform movement had expected.
Philology may have detected many a flaw in many a
Talmudic argument, and proved that the interpreta-
tions of the more ancient sources of the Babylonian
or even the Palestinian schools were homiletical
rather than exegetical; whilst history may have dis-
covered that certain usages and even certain beliefs
were of a foreign origin; but the same instruments
of research helped to reveal the following important
facts. First, that Judaism was an organism with a
natural growth, rooted in the Torah; the inheritance
of the congregation of Jacob, not the artificial prod-
uct of Rabbinical conferences, commissions and
sub-committees. It grew out of the tree of Life,
the Torah, whose commandments were never put
to a vote; never did Jewish authorities meet with the
purpose of accepting a foreign belief or un-Jewish
usages. The injunction of the Law — "Inquire not
after their gods, saying 'How did these nations serve
their gods? Even so I will do likewise' " (Deut.
12: 30) — an injunction specially applicable to
worship, was always before their eyes. That certain
foreign beliefs and foreign usages should creep in
was unavoidable, as Israel neither could nor would
shut itself off entirely from the influences of the outside
world. But they had to pass through that process
of assimilation to things Jewish, and of elimination

178 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

of things un- Jewish, which was strongly at work
in the Synagogue; and through this their trans-
formation and complete conversion to Judaism, so
to speak, were effected. It will suffice to recall here —
with particular reference to beliefs — the history of
the "Logos" in its various metamorphoses in the
Church, and its different history in the Synagogue.

Secondly, research has proved that the Torah,
even within the limits of the Pentateuch, is the very
life of Judaism, and that its abrogation means death.
Against this stronghold, which, as history testifies,
Israel defended with its very life, were directed all
the attacks of both Pagan and Christian fanaticism,
and the battle is now continued by our modern "ama-
teur Gentiles." The Sabbath and the Covenant of
Abraham are especially mentioned as the com-
mandments of the Torah for which Israel had under-
gone martyrdom. And the mere thought that the
abolition of such laws should be discussed and reported
upon by appointed commissions is appalling and
abhorrent to the Jewish historical conscience. The
same can be said of the retention of Hebrew in the
Synagogue; for though a certain Halachah offers
concessions in this respect, history teaches that
Judaism, by the mere instinct of self-preservation,
rarely, if ever, made use in the Synagogue of any other
but the sacred language. The assertion that the
Jewish historian Herzfeld, in his objection to the
replacing of Hebrew by German in the Synagogue
was moved by sentiment or romantic reasons, cannot
be entertained for a moment. Any man who has ever
read Herzf eld's Geschichte des Volkes Israel — which is,
indeed, very hard reading, and taxes all the powers

BEGINNINGS OF JEWISH WISSENSCHAFT 179

of the student — knows how little its author was given
to romanticism and sentimentalism. A more sober
and dry — though a very painstaking — scholar never
lived. But he was an historian after all, and could
not well agree to the entire banishment of the Hebrew
language from the Synagogue; for this would mean,
as he himself expresses it, 'The abandoning of our
positive historical standpoint." Altogether it seems
that these "hard-shell" modernists think that they
have only to stigmatize a man as a romanticist,
or a thing as savouring of romanticism, to eliminate
them from further consideration. The savage chief
in Africa thinks the Christian missionary, who en-
deavors to beautify his cottage by his little garden
of flowers, a useless romanticist, as he could better
employ his time and his money by cultivating sweet
potatoes and corn. The Lyceum philosopher, with
his universal ignorance, looks contemptuously upon
the quiet scholar who is blinding himself with the
deciphering of MSS. or the interpretation of the
great ideas of the heroes of the world, as a romanticist,
who could better spend his time in the writing of a
slashing article or an eloquent address, which,
indeed, would be more profitable to his reputation
with the mob. George Eliot describes romanticism
as the thing which helps to fill some dull blanks with
love and knowledge. The mission of the scholar in
our time seems to be to fill some dull minds with
love and knowledge of things sacred and sublime,
which things bourgeois philosophy declares to be and
endeavors to make blank and void.

Thirdly, research has taught that universalistic
Judaism, propagated by means of abolishing the Law

180 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

and at the risk of the final absorption of Israel by its
surroundings, is in contradiction to the teachings of
the Bible, the teachings of the Talmud, and all
Jewish opinion that has come down to us from antiq-
uity, from the Middle Ages, and even from modern
times as late as the middle of the last century. It
is anti-prophetical — unless, in a Christian spirit, we
sterilize the nationalistic passages pervading the whole
of the Bible. It is anti-Rabbinical — unless we tear
out passages from the contexts and pervert their
meaning. In brief, it is non-Jewish and un-Jewish.
It has no root and no room in Jewish thought, and
derives its pedigree from Paul's Epistles.

It is not, then, to reform tendencies that we are
to look for the main impulse and continuous encour-
agement of Jewish learning. The scientific movement
began long before the looming of Rationalism. The
first attempt, indeed, towards the building up of a
Jewish science was given by R. Azariah de Rossi,
the author of the Meor Enayim, who flourished about
the end of the sixteenth century. De Rossi, however,
was out of date with his criticism, and for reasons
which cannot be entered upon here he left no real
impress on his time. More successful in their at-
tempts, though they were hardly conscious of the
nature of their work of regeneration, were two
Lithuanian Jews of the second half of the eighteenth
century, R. Elijah, of Wilna, commonly called "the
Gaon of Wilna," and R. Jechiel Heilperin, of Minsk.
The latter is best known by his work, Seder Ha-
Doroth, or the . Chronology of the Generations, which
deals especially with the successive generations of

BEGINNINGS OF JEWISH WISSENSCHAFT 181

the Tannaim and Amoraim. It is now superseded,
in parts at least, by works of a more recent date, but
only one who knows for how many centuries this
branch of study was almost entirely neglected, can
appreciate what it meant to prove for the first time
that there existed such a thing as a science of Rab-
binical succession, which alone can establish the
claims of tradition. The book further proves the
danger of the terrible thing called anachronism, against
which scholars have always to be on their guard.
We have now some better books on this subject, but
they would never have been written without the aid
of the monumental work of Heilperin, who first
collected the materials in a systematic way and so
made possible the task of the historians, who both
exploited and patronized him.

Of even greater significance was the work of "the
Gaon." If there ever was a prince in Israel, reigning
supreme in its intellectual world, it was the Gaon of
Wilna. He mastered it all; the whole of the Scrip-
tures, as well as its Targumim; the whole of theMish-
nah, as well as the Tosephta and other products of
the Tannaim; the whole of the Talmud; the Talmud
of Babylon, as well as the Talmud of Jerusalem; the
whole of the Midrashim; the Midrash Halacha, as
well as the Midrash Haggada, in addition to that
vast Responsa literature of Commentaries, Codes,
Responsa, philosophic and mystical treatises, and
edifying works, which grew up during the last eigh-
teen centuries. What is of pre-eminent importance
is his attitude towards the commentaries; more
particularly the commentaries to the earlier Rabbinic

182 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

works which embody Jewish tradition, such as the
Talmud, the Mishnah, and the Midrash, etc. The
defect of many of these commentaries consisted
largely in the fact that they failed to comply with
the principle laid down by R. Hai Gaon. This is
to the effect that the first duty of a commentator is
to convey correctly the views of his author, and not
to intrude upon them with views of his own. The
rationalistic, and not less the mystical schools were,
as is well known, great sinners in this respect. How-
ever, it is not for modernism to throw the first stone.
In our eagerness to adapt Judaism to all things pos-
sible and impossible, we occasionally force upon the
Talmud and the Bible up-to-date opinions, upon
which Sage and Seer could have looked only with
horror and dismay. But even those commentators
who owed no allegiance to any particular school,
have not always been successful in their endeavor
to give us the exact meanings of the words of their
authors. And this for the simple reason that these
words often came down to them in such a fragmentary
form or such a corrupt text, that they defied all
explanation. This is the case with all ancient liter-
ature, as everybody knows who has read a classic
coming from antiquity. But the difficulties increase
with the Talmud, when one considers its peculiar
form, its elliptical sentences, its rambling style, and,
above all, the abrupt and uncertain methods of
its compilers.

These difficulties the Gaon endeavored to sur-
mount by applying to the Rabbinic literature the
old Rabbinic rule, "The words of the Torah are poor

BEGINNINGS OF JEWISH WISSENSCHAFT 183

in the one place, but wealthy in another!" Through
his acquaintance with the whole of the Torah, he had
no difficulty in discovering the wealthy places. If
there was a difficult passage in this or that tractate,
he showed, by giving a reference to some other place,
that it was wanting in some words or lines. Obscure
passages in the Mishnah he tried to eludicate by
parallel passages in the Tosephta, or in the Mechilta
or the Sifra. The complicated controversies of the
Babylonian Talmud he tried to explain by comparing
them with the passages in the simpler Talmud of
Jerusalem. If we remember that it was just these
ancient Rabbinic productions, which were neglected
for centuries, we shall at once appreciate his great-
ness. He almost re-discovered them. Nor was he
satisfied with the mere joy of the discovery; he wrote
commentaries or glosses in a brief, concise way to
almost the whole of the ancient Jewish literature,
including the Talmud of Babylon, always remaining
true to his principle that the author has to explain
himself. With this great contribution the founda-
tions for textual criticism were laid.

The other places, however, in which the wealth of
the Torah is to be found have, in numberless cases,
proved to be manuscripts or rare prints. Unfortu-
nately, they were largely out of the reach of the Gaon.
A few manuscripts may, perhaps, have been in his
possession, as is implied occasionally by some of his
emendations. But, even if this be the case, their
number must have been very small; it may be fairly
doubted whether the Gaon had seen in his life more
than half a dozen. As to rare prints and early

184 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

editions, I hardly believe that he ever had the oppor-
tunity to make use of them; the regular Hebrew
library, in a Russian community consisted as a rule
of cheap editions of the Bible, the Talmud, and other
standard books of the Rabbinic literature essential to
the practicing rabbi, but little beyond this. Private
collections were very few. As to public collections,
neither the Polish, nor the Russian, nor even the
German Government possessed at that time many
Hebrew books in their national libraries; whilst the
few libraries in France and in Italy and other places,
which included Hebrew collections, were not access-
ible to the Jews. As far as our knowledge goes (but
I must admit that the matter has never been properly
investigated), the first Jew who was admitted to any
public library was R. Chayim Joseph David Azulai.
He made an entry of this fact in his diary, Maagal
Tob. The great event occurred on the 6th of "Te-
beth," in the year 1778, when he went with his
friend, a Gentile, to the library of Paris, in which he
saw thousands of manuscripts "in all wisdoms" (or
subjects). He saw also hundreds of Hebrew manu-
scripts, a Bible on parchment, 717 years old, and ever
so many books on philosophy, astronomy, early
Kabbala and other important books. This liberality
towards Azulai was probably a consequence of his
having enjoyed the reputation that it was in his power
to work miracles by means of amulets. The French
nobles of the period preceding the great Revolution,
with all their rationalism, were by no means insensible
to these occult powers of Azulai, and asked both for
his blessing and his amulets. But it must be admitted

BEGINNINGS OF JEWISH WISSENSCHAFT 185

that Azulai made the best of his opportunities, as
will be seen from another entry in the same diary:
"Thursday: — The Marquis and his wife came and
seated themselves near me, and she asked me to pray
for her. She also told me that she reads the Bible.
Further, that she sometimes sees angels and demons,
who address her. Among others she also mentioned
the Baal-Shem of London[this the well-known Falk].
She told me also that a Jew gave her a Kabbalistic
book and recounted to me other wonderful things.
I answered several questions which she put to me.
And on that day I went to the Library of Manu-
scripts and copied a part of the commentaries of R.
Isaiah of Trani. I went about the Library, in which
they have ever so many manuscripts written in
numerous languages, and bearing upon all wisdoms
and religions. The collection also contains a long
book written on broad leaves of the palm branch —
Lulab," (perhaps he meant papyrus).

To return to the Gaon. That Rabbi Elijah of
Wilna was not quite insensible to the wealth of the
Torah buried in inaccessible MSS. may be concluded
from the book, (Rab Poolim) by his son, R. Abraham
Wilna. R. Abraham died in 1809, but his book re-
mained in manuscript for eighty-five years, when it
was published by Herr Chanes. Its contents often
remind us of Zunz's Gottesdienstlichen Vortraege, but
it was chiefly intended to furnish a list of the lost
Midrashim and other ancient Rabbinic works known
only from quotations, and it was written with the
set purpose of inaugurating a systematic search after
these works. "How shall we search," R. Abraham

186 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

says, "if we are quite ignorant of our losses?" Here
the influence of the Gaon is visible; for the regular
Rabbinic students of the time were, as already indi-
cated, quite satisfied with the literature at their
disposal, which was adequate for practical purposes.
Besides R. Abraham, we may mention here a few
other Russian scholars who came under the Gaon's
influence; such as R. Abigdor of Slonim, the commen-
tator of the Tosephta; and R. Enoch Zindel, the
annotator of several Midrashim. The greatest,
though the youngest, of this school was, undoubtedly,
R. Raphael Rabbinowitz, the author of the Variae
Lectiones to the Talmud of Babylon, which is a
marvel of industry, learning, and sound criticism.
Unfortunately, the work was interrupted by the
death of the author when it reached the fifteenth
volume. How far R. Isaiah Pick of Breslau, who
worked on the same lines as the Gaon, was influenced
by him, I am unable to say.

But neither Pick nor the Gaon had any immediate
influence upon their successors in Germany. The
rationalistic school, succeeding Mendelssohn, had
very little use for manuscripts. I dare say that even
the printed books were too many for them. They
were a set of mere dilettanti who cared to study as
little and write as much as possible. One need only
read Peter Beer's book on The Sects and Hertz
Homberg's Catechism to see how little the one was
of an historian and the other of a theologian.

Jewish science in Germany only began with the
ebb of the rationalistic wave, which swept over
Germany during the French Revolution. When it

BEGINNINGS OF JEWISH WISSENSCHAFT 187

has spent its force, men go back to history, and the
past is restored to its rights but not to its wrongs.
This tendency was felt everywhere, by Krochmal,
Rappaport, and Chayess in the East, as well as Zunz,
Fraenkel, Sachs, Graetz, and others in the West-
To mention here only the first of these luminaries
in each series, we can point to Rappaport's famous
biographies of R. Saadya Gaon, of R. Nathan, the
author of the Aruch, of R. Hai Gaon, the last of the
Gaonim, of R. Eliezer Kalir, the great liturgical
poet, and of R. Hananel, and of R. Nissim of Cairo-
wan. In Germany we have Zunz's Gottesdienstlichen
Vortraege. Each of these productions was epoch-
making in its time, opening new worlds to students.
The men, for instance, who formed the subject of
Rappaport's researches were not mere individuals,
but heads of schools, of either Talmudical or litur-
gical schools, as in the case of Nathan and Kalir;
Hananel and Nissim, again, ushered in a new wpoch
in which the Torah was decentralised from Babylon,
and new seats of learning were established in different
parts of the world. As to Zunz's Gottesdienstlichen
Vortraege, it is enough to say that it is practically a
history of tradition in its Agadic aspect. As is clear
from the contents of the book, it very soon outgrew
the narrow plan of the author, who began it with the
purpose of showing the propriety of the sermon in
the vernacular in the Synagogue. An essay of twenty
pages would have amply served this purpose. Nor
was there, as subsequent history showed, any real
objection to the sermon as such. No protest was ever
raised in Russia or Poland or Lithuania against the

1 88 SEMI N A RY A D DRESSES

Maggid or the Darshan. The real objection was, in
many cases, to the undue importance given to the
sermon, which made it likely to supersede worship,
"so that it was he, not He, who was the center of
attraction," and to the preacher himself, who was
not in every congregation distinguished by his loyalty
to traditional Judaism, and lastly, to the contents
of the sermon, which were not always in harmony
with the teachings of Judaism.

The books which Zunz and Rappaport and their
contemporaries consulted in their gigantic works were
certainly more numerous than those which were at
the disposal of the Gaon. The later masters had also
the advantage of being acquainted more or less with
the classical idioms, as well as the cognate Semitic
dialects, which, with the exception of the Aramaic,
remained a sealed book to the Gaon and his school.
But the number of manuscripts they consulted was
certainly not large. It is enough to record here that
Zunz had hardly occasion to consult half a dozen
when writing the Gottesdienstlichen Vortraege. It was
only in later life that he examined the collections of
the Bodleian Library in Oxford and of the British
Museum in London, which laid the foundation for
his works on the liturgy and hymnology of the
Synagogue. He travelled also in Italy, where he
examined the contents of various libraries, but, as is
clear from this article, Die Hebraeischen Handschriften
in Italien, he was not admitted to the Vatican.
There, as he expresses himself in a rather midrashic
manner, "the Dragon was still blocking the way to
the Hebrew collections." Much smaller were the

BEGINNINGS OF JEWISH WISSENSCHAFT 189

opportunities for using manuscripts given to Rappa-
port, Chayess, Krochmal, and other builders of
Jewish science. Rappaport's main source for informa-
tion contained in manuscripts was the great Samuel
David Luzzatto of Padua, who supplied his friend
as well as other scholars with extracts from his library,
which was a real treasure of rare prints and Hebrew
manuscripts. The majority of workers, however,
had little or no access to great libraries, and were
dependent upon the small collections of their native
cities, which both in Germany and the bordering
countries, as a rule, were neither rich nor very select.
Considering, on the one hand, the vast domain of
Rabbinic literature extending over two thousand
years, and on the other, the poverty of Jewish scholars
and the paucity of those able to travel extensively,
it is clear that it was only a very small proportion of
their work to which they could apply the critical
apparatus which largely depends on great libraries.
It will suffice to state here the fact that neither Weiss,
the author of the History of Tradition, nor Fried-
mann, the greatest of our editors of ancient Rab-
binical texts, was ever in a position to travel for the
purpose of examining the contents of the great libra-
ries of Europe. The only collections to which they
had access were the Vienna Beth-Hamidrash Library,
and the few Hebrew MSS. deposited in the Imperial
Library of Austria.

Now we are thoroughly grateful for the good
things received, but there is still much more in store
for us to be received. The Gottesdienstlichen Vor-
traege, which will always remain a standard work,

190 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

is now, in many places, in need of revision, because of
the various Rabbinic works published from manu-
script since 1835. The editions of Friedmann, which
are and will always remain models of scientific
workmanship, would also bear a new edition, especially
the Mechilta and the Sifre, for which he hardly had
any manuscript at his disposal. In the Midrash
Agada, Buber was especially active, and we are
grateful to him for ever so many smaller and larger
Agadic works, which he published from manuscripts;
but of the main Midrashim, that is, the Midrash
Rabba to the Five Books of Moses, we have only
about a third part of the Midrash to Genesis properly
edited by Dr. Theodor. Of the Tosephta, we have
an edition of Zuckermandl, which, however imperfect,
gives us the Erfurt and Vienna manuscripts of this
Tannaitic collection. On the other hand, we have
as yet no scientific edition of the Misnah, the main
authority of traditional Judaism. All that we possess
is a reprint of the Cambridge manuscript, and a good
edition of Pirke Aboth, by the late Dr. Taylor. But
of the most important manuscript, which is in Parma,
and of another in the possession of the Budapest
Academy, hardly any use has been made. Of the
Talmud of Babylon, we have the Variae Lectiones
compiled by Rabbinowitz, but his work, as mentioned
above, remains unfinished because of his early death.
For a proper edition of the Talmud of Jerusalem, we
are only now beginning to collect materials.

It is evident, from the preceding remarks, that our
libraries have not yet been thoroughly explored.
Indeed, they would bear exploration for another

BEGINNINGS OF JEWISH WISSENSCHAFT 191

generation; and even such as are most accessible, the
British Museum and the Bodleian Library, are by no
means exhausted. As to those less accessible, such
as the Library at Parma, for instance, it is just
touched on the surface, notwithstanding the many
pilgrimages of Zunz, Berliner, and others. Nor have
our great standard works been edited; we are just
beginning to collect materials for really scientific
editions. Our history, it is true, was written by Graetz,
not to mention the contributions by Jost, Kayser-
ling, and others. But the materials at their command
were decidedly not of such a nature as to make the
work of their successors superfluous. Let me not be
misunderstood; I do not belong to the detractors of
Graetz, whose history will always remain a monu-
mental work. His notes and appendices are sufficient
to place him in the foremost rank of our historians.
It is true that he was not entirely impartial, but I
have often observed that impartiality in history means
as much as unsectarianism in religion. In religion,
or rather theology, it implies admiring all other
religions but your own ; in history it stands for toady-
ing to your antagonists and losing all understanding
for yourself. It may further be true that a certain
rationalism, from which few German scholars of
that generation could emancipate themselves, made
Graetz rather unfair towards mysticism and Russian
Judaism; but this could easily be corrected. What
his work really suffered in was the insufficiency of
materials at his disposal. He had very few manu-
scripts to furnish him with facts, and thus was too
much dependent on hypothesis. It will suffice to

192 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

mention here his chapter on the history of the Kar-
aites, which he wrote when hardly half a dozen lines
coming from Anan, the founder of the sect, were
known. Of these few lines, Graetz certainly made the
best use possible; but now we have large fragments
of Anan's Book of Commandments. Again, in his
account of the decentralization of the schools from
Babylon, Graetz had to spin history from a mere
legend. The facts simply did not exist. Sometimes
he had to rely on very faulty texts which he had no
means of controlling, because of his inability to travel
and to search after MSS. It is mortifying to think
that he never, for instance, had the opportunity to
read the Achimaaz Chronicle, which was buried in
some Spanish cloister and was edited only after his
death. How different would have been his presenta-
tion of the early history of the Jews in the South of
Italy and other places in the vicinity of the Medi-
terranean, had he had the good fortune to study this
most interesting document.

Foremost of all, it is to be noted that neither to
Graetz nor to the great majority of his contemporaries
was it granted to make sufficient use of the opening
of the Orient with its wealth of Hebrew manu-
scripts. Many were already gone when this event
took place. Even Rabbinowitz, who used a larger
number of manuscripts for his Variae Lectiones than
any other Jewish author has utilized for the edition
of a single work, was in the possession of hardly more
than one Oriental manuscript, which was presented
to him by the Rabbi of Cairo. It was only late in
the sixties of the last century that communication

BEGINNINGS OF JEWISH WISSENSCHAFT 193

was established with the Orient through the efforts
of the famous traveler, Jacob Saphir of Jerusalem.
His travels to Yemen placed us in the possession of
quite a new class or family of MSS., till then entirely
unknown. It gave us new grammarians, new com-
mentators to the Bible, new liturgies, new Divans,
both sacred and secular, and new Midrashim. But,
unfortunately, in 1870, when the first results of his
newly found treasures were published, many of our
great scholars were already gone, whilst the few who
remained were almost all too old for work. Zunz
himself, as far as I know, only had occasion to describe
one or two Yemen manuscripts of a liturgical nature.
Saphir was followed by other travellers; particularly
by the notorious Shapiro, who furnished the Euro-
pean libraries and museums with many a forgery,
but also with many a genuine old manuscript coming
from Yemen. Amongst these latter, the most im-
portant was probably the Midrash Haggadol, which,
in itself, forms a large library. It is a sort of homi-
letical commentary to the Pentateuch in five volumes;
but it restored to us many extracts from Tannaitic
works, whose existence was only faintly guessed by
scholars. The greatest gift, however, which the
Orient has given to us is the Cairo Genizah, which,
with the abundance of its material, the variety of
its contents, and the wealth of its historical docu-
ments, has made us all feel that the light has come
again from the East, illumining our past and strength-
ening our hope for the future, as no other event in the
scholarly world during the last centuries had done.
Verily the life of the student is once more worth living.

THE TEST THE RABBI SHOULD APPLY.*

PRECIOUS is the seventh," is an old Jewish
adage, and it is particularly precious to me in
view of the fact that it is for the seventh time that
we are gathered in this hall to confer the degrees of
Rabbi and Doctor upon our students. It is a sort
of Sabbatical year in the existence of the reorganized
Seminary, inviting in a certain measure to rest and
recreation, but even more to thought and reflection.
The subject nearest to our thoughts on this
solemn occasion is, as hardly need be said, the office
of the Rabbi, his position in the community, and his
significance for the perpetuation of Judaism. I
often had occasion to speak of all these matters both
at the Commencements and at other public gather-
ings, so that it is almost impossible to avoid repeti-
tion. However, the nearness of the Feast of the
Revelation, for which we are all now preparing (or
ought to prepare), suggests some thoughts which,
if not quite new, will certainly be timely. I am think-
ing of the interpretation given by the Rabbis to the
commandment, "Thou shalt not take the name of
the Lord, thy God in vain." This commandment
some Rabbis explain to mean, "Accept no dignity of
which thou art not worthy." Another Rabbi further
illustrates it with the words, "I, God, am called the
Holy One, and thou art called holy. Behold, if thou

*Address delivered at the Graduating Exercises of the Seminary,
June 5, 1910.

196 . SEMINARY ADDRESSES

dost not possess all the qualities of holiness, accept
no dignity." The dignity of which our sages speak
in this place is that of Judge and Rabbi in their
capacity as leaders of the community; and the spec-
ial divine attribute which they expect in the leader
of a community is, as you see, holiness.

Holiness is a wide subject, offering many aspects,
as indeed all abstract qualities do, but I will only
urge here one or two of these which are in need of par-
ticular emphasis. One of its main aspects, according
to our sages, is absolute self-denial. Indeed, they
teach that he who accepts any public office with the
purpose of deriving from it any personal gain com-
mits an act of gross immorality. I do not think that
our sages would have objected to the maintenance
of the Rabbi by his congregation. The highest ideal,
as I had once occasion to mention, was that the
Rabbi should impart his spiritual bounties to his
congregation in the manner divine in which all
blessing is a mere act of grace. But except in very
rare cases, conditions made this ideal unattainable,
and it was soon found necessary that the grace should
just as much be exercised on the part of the com-
munity providing for the material needs of the
Rabbi, as on the part of the Rabbi, who is to watch
over the spiritual needs of the community. It was,
however, never thought that the call of this sacred
office should exactly become a regular profession in
the sense of a bread-winning occupation. The
divine call which urged the young man to devote
himself to the profession of the Rabbi always pre-

THE TEST THE RABBI SHOULD APPLY 197

ceded the formal call of the community with its
appointments and stipulated contract. Many famous
men in Israel who wielded the greatest authority
over their contemporaries, and even over posterity,
remained throughout their lives without such a
formal call. Maimonides, for instance, never received
such a call, and yet he was considered the spiritual
head of Egypt and the neighboring countries. And
least of all would the greatness of the Rabbi ever
have been measured by the favorable conditions
regarding salary and other material advantages
stipulated in such a formal call, which seems to have
become the regular standard of Rabbinical authority
in our times.

Humility and meekness and sweet submission
are other features of self-denial. The holy man is
certainly not a respecter of persons, nor does he bow
to current opinion when not in harmony with his
convictions. He is fearless and straightforward.
Yet he is distinguished by a certain reticence, by a
certain delicacy of feeling, which make him shrink
from everything loud, sensational, and the intruding
of his personality upon the public. He glories in his
mission, but you will certainly never find him doing
anything aiming at the glorifying of the missionary.

Even in his praise of his friends and his colleagues
he is sparing, strong as his devotion may be to them,
as such praise is seldom free from a subconscious
expectation of return, with interest. Indeed, in the
constitution of a Rabbinical Association (or Club),
which counted among its members such men as

198 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

Azulai, Galante and Buton, we find in the by-laws
that no member should ever mention a word in praise
of his colleagues, or even of their leaders. On the
other hand, everyone of them was bound to admonish
his friend of his shortcomings, which the latter had
not only to accept without resentment, but with
love and gratitude. I wish these saints would have
left us the minutes of their club. The difference
between these and the accounts of our present
gatherings, religious and social, would certainly
have been worth a study.

But let me remind you at once of the further
dictum of our sages, TDPJ pKil Dj; tff?, "no ignorant
man can be'a saint." Speaking in the presence of
Rabbis, I hardly need say that by ignorance I do not
mean the absence of knowledge as a consequence of
a deficient training, though, unfortunately, such
cases occur. However, these cases as a rule are more
in the class of "latter-day prophets" than of Rabbis.
What I mean by ignorance is that engendered by a
lack of will or opportunity to continue those studies,
the foundation of which was laid in halls such as
these. The consequence of this ignorance is deplor-
able: an utter thoughtlessness about all things
divine. The Rabbi is expected to "do things." Upon
this we are all agreed; but he should also have the
opportunity to think things. Young men in the
ministry sometimes come to me with the complaint
that the communities in which they are placed do
not offer a sufficient field of work. My answer in
certain cases is: "If you have time to spare from all

THE TEST THE RABBI SHOULD APPLY 199

the manifold duties a congregation offers, social and
religious, the best thing you might do is to devote the
rest of your time to study." But I usually meet with
very little response, the feeling on the part of the
Rabbi being that the rumor of his being "addicted to
Jewish learning" will bring him into disrepute and
will only prove injurious to his career. Why this
should be so is a riddle to me. Europe, which many
have accepted as a model in so many respects, offers
us some of the best books of real scientific value
written by clergymen, Jewish as well as Christian.
Would it be indeed such a calamity if among the
hundreds of ministers we count in this country, we
would have at least a sprinkling of learned men, who
would, now and then, favor us with such pieces of
work as the Jewish Eschatology from Daniel to Akiba,
by Von Woltz, Stadt-Pfarrer, at Leonberg (Wuerthem-
berg), or The Religious and Ethical Conceptions of
the Old Testament, the Apocrypha and the Pseudepi-
grapha, by Ludwig Conrad, Pfarrer zu Klinkow bei
Prenzlau? Would it really bring disgrace upon
Israel in this country if its spiritual destinies would
now and then be presided over by men of the stamp
of Dr. Kohut and Dr. Jastrow, who left us the
greatest Rabbinical Dictionaries, or Herzfeld and
Sachs and Kayserling, who gave to the world the
best books on the most important periods of Jewish
history, or Dr. Szold, who bequeathed to us one of
the most lucid commentaries on the Book of Job?

We are fond of speaking of Judaism as a religion,
though we practically never define the nature of this

200 SEMI N A RY A DDRESSES

religion, our attitude towards its doctrines and pre-
cepts and promises, and the obligation it devolves
upon us. But have you ever seen a great religion
without its learned orders or at least learned clergy?
And, least of all, how should Judaism, with its tradi-
tions of learning, with its vast literature, with the
prominent feature of Torah (teaching) subsist without
scholars, without students? Maimonides tells us,
"And He (God) said unto us through Isaiah, the good
messenger of the nation, that the sign between Him
and us and the convincing pledge that Israel will
never perish is the fact that His Torah and His word
remain among us." Do you believe that this pledge
still holds good when the Jewish laity is further from
any knowledge of the Torah, including the Bible,
than any other section of the community, whilst the
Jewish minister is expected to be anything and every-
thing: an organizer, a social agitator, an expert in
all topics of the day, but is never expected to be a
sound Hebrew scholar?

It is true that we live here a more strenuous life
than they do in Europe, and that the demands on
the practical side are greater than they are elsewhere.
But what is life without thought, and, least of all,
what value has Jewish religious life without Jewish
religious thought? Besides, I am only pleading for
a sprinkling or remnant which would be devoted to
this Jewish religious thought, but which may prove
a leaven to the community and a healthy and helpful
religious force to all their brethren in the pulpit.

I must further remark that when I speak here of
holiness I am thinking of Jewish holiness which, as

THE TEST THE RABBI SHOULD APPLY 201

you will find in so many theological works, is always
described as "the peculiar" Jewish conception of
holiness. It just as much includes the ritual and
ceremonial as the ethical holiness. Altogether, never
forget that you are Jewish preachers, and that there
is no other standard for you but that supplied by
Judaism. Perhaps I may illustrate this counsel by
the following story communicated by R. Solomon
ibn Verga, in his Shebet Jehudah, which runs as
follows: Among the exiles from Spain there was a
Jew and his family, who, by reason of the epidemic
which broke out in the boat which carried him away
from his native country, was compelled to land on
some desolate place remote from all human habita-
tion. His wife, who was very delicate, became ex-
hausted and died. Famished and worn out, he carried
his two sick children, but at last fatigue and hunger
overpowered him, and he fainted and fell down.
When he awoke from his trance he found his two
children dead by his side. He then rose to his feet
and in his grief exclaimed: "Master of the world,
much hast Thou done unto me which hastens my
steps toward apostacy. But know it for a certainty
that against the very will of those who dwell in
heaven, a Jew I am and a Jew I shall remain, in
spite of all the suffering Thou hast brought and may
still bring over me."

My friends, we can well realize how this exile
came to think that the power of heaven was against
him. He was just fleeing from a country which was
at that time perhaps the greatest world power history

202 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

had ever seen. Its Church was certainly the most
powerful one in the world, and certainly more uni-
versal than any Church ever was or ever will be.
Indeed, its missionaries were soon to overrun new
continents — the West Indies as well as the East
Indies, and if you have read, for instance, Parkman's
"History of Canada," you will admit that these mis-
sionaries were not entirely devoid of spirituality.
So, as it seemed to this poor exile, both the powers
on earth and the powers in heaven were arrayed
against Judaism. Thank God, we have now to fear
very little the powers on earth. The very country
which Spain was to discover and in which discovery
it reached the zenith of its power, was destined by
Providence to prove, in the course of history, the
refuge of the descendants of the very fellow-exiles
of this great Spanish Jew. And so in other parts of
the world, especially in Western Europe, Israel is
enjoying more or less the protection of the powers
on earth, giving them at least equality before the
law and guaranteeing in part the fruits of their
emancipation.

But it is, if I may say so, the imaginary powers
of heaven against which we have to be on our guard.
Ideals are put up, ignoring history and all its lessons
but appealing to theological commonplaces which
have a heavenly look about them. I know of no other
advice to give you but that you try all these new
ideals by the test of this Spanish Jew. Thus you will
hear a great deal about the ideal of a universal
religion. You will even be made to understand that

THE TEST THE RABBI SHOULD APPLY 203

this was the ideal of our prophets, though by some
accident or other they were misunderstood by the
Jews for a period of eighteen hundred years or more.
It is certainly very flattering to our pride and vanity
to be told that it is in our power to become the
spiritual conquerors of the world at the cost of a small
sacrifice — of a small volume called the Pentateuch.
But the only test you can apply to it is that of the poor
Spanish exile. Will you after this conquest be Jews
and remain Jews, or not? If it does not bear this
test, you maybe sure that the message is not a heavenly
one. This test you can apply to all the points which
are now the subject of controversy, such as the
Sunday service, the gradual banishment of the He-
brew from the synagogue as the language of prayer
and worship, and abolition of certain festivals in favor
of more convenient days, the abrogation of almost
the entire ritual law, the neglecting of every specific
Jewish ceremony, the obliteraticn of all reference
to Zion and Jerusalem from our liturgy, and many
other points like these. You will be told that all this
is done for the sake of heaven and for the great cause
of religion. I need not enter into details, but I can
only repeat what I have just said: Ask yourself
seriously and honestly whether or not all this will
bear the test of that Spanish Jew. "A Jew I am and
a Jew I shall remain." If the latter be the case, then
it is your sacred duty to prove yourself the descend-
ants of the stiff-necked ones, and defy heaven as that
Spanish exile did defy heaven and earth.

This Jewish standard may, to a certain extent, be
also applied to the social work of the Rabbi. I am

204 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

led to this remark by a passage which I have read in
the book of an Englishman who recently traveled
through this country. Among others, he also visited,
as it seems, our charitable institutions and came a
great deal into contact with settlement workers.
This traveler reports that the head of a prominent
settlement house made the remark to him that "the
sentiment of pity and mercy as a motive of social
service has become outworn." The new motive, he
declares, is "a certain spirit of moral adventure,
carrying a suggestion of statesmanship." Now, as
Rabbis, you will probably take your share in social
work which, as I hope, will become with everyone of
you a part of his Rabbinical duties. I do not know
what your attitude will be toward these moral adven-
tures. I have some dread of all adventures, but I do
not think myself competent to give an opinion about
them. However, whatever your attitude may be, be
Jews and remain Jews, and do not allow the sentiment
of pity and mercy to become worn out. Pity and
mercy may not be statesmanlike, but they are a
"divine weakness" and always proved Israel's strength.
Mercifulness and loving-kindness are, according to our
sages, among the criteria distinguishing the people
of Israel. You also know the regular Jewish expression
D^jCm *J2 D^Om ^tf"*it?*, "Israel are a compassionate
people, the descendants of a compassionate people."
You have also heard of the Jewish heart. Do not fail
to cultivate these sentiments and to keep them alive
among your congregants. Be not so overawed by
the sense of organization as to put these great Jewish

THE TEST THE RABBI SHOULD APPLY 205

virtues into the background. You can fully hope
for God's mercy even if you commit a sin in this
direction; do not allow your congregants to lose
heart — the Jewish heart. This Jewish peculiarity
will certainly do no harm to us.

And now, my friends, with these words I will
take leave of you, at least for a time. My travels
will lead me over two continents, where I shall
probably have occasion to visit many an institution
of Jewish learning and many a training school for
Jewish Rabbis and Jewish teachers. But I shall
feel proud and easy in my mind when you will give
me reason to think that with whatever obstacles
you may meet, whatever difficulties you will have to
overcome, whatever sacrifices you will be compelled
to make, you will never allow yourself to be led astray
even by heaven or by earth from carrying out this
programme of the great unknown, "Jews we are and
Jews we shall remain."

THE BETH HAMIDRASH.*

I HAVE never realized the force of the Rabbinic
interpretation to Psalm 84, verse 8, as this evening.
I am referring to the Scriptural words: "They go
from strength to strength," which the Rabbis interpret
to refer to the man who goes forth from the Synagogue
to the Beth Hamidrash, or the House of Learning or
the School of Interpretation and Research, to be
there occupied in the study of the Torah. But it
never struck me so forcibly as when looking upon
this complex of buildings arisen within the last few
years, comprehending a place of worship, a religious
school and a school for teachers. To these has now
been added the Beth Hamidrash, forming the goal of
religious and intellectual activity; which we are dedi-
cating this evening. In the few remarks I am about
to make, I will dwell on the latter.

The author responsible for the term "Beth
Hamidrash," to which those who are thirsty for
wisdom are invited, is Jesus, the Son of Sirach. He
was the first to coin this term, which has become
classical in Jewish literature, and we might as well
consult him as to the meaning which he attached to
it. This we learn from another passage in his book.

*Address delivered at the Dedication of the Dropsie College
Building, Philadelphia, Pa., March 11, 1912.

208 SEMI N A RY A DDRESSES

After enlarging upon the men of different trades and
handicrafts who "maintain the fabric of the world,"
but whom he does not give credit for "public counsel"
or for "sentence of judgment," he describes his
ideal man as follows:

He is the one that hath applied his soul,
And meditateth in the law of the Most High;
He will seek out the wisdom of the ancients,
And will be occupied in prophecies.
He will keep the discourses of men of renown;
And where subtle parables are, he will be there also,
He will seek out the secrets of grave sentences,
And be conversant in dark parables.

This, then, the study of the Bible, the cultivation
of the wisdom of the ancients, as well as the elucida-
tion of those secret grave sentences, is what consti-
tutes learning and is the purpose for which the Beth
Hamidrash is established. Sirach flourished in the
second century, B. C. But his conception of learning
became a tradition and formed the ideal for thousands
of years after him in all Jewish colleges and academies
or, as they were called in Hebrew, Botte Midrashoth
and Yeshiboth. The only additions made were the
productions of the Oral Law which, of course, in the
age of Sirach, could not as yet have been a regular
object of study.

And this was further, what the founder of this
College, Moses A. Dropsie, whose anniversary we
commemorate also this evening, arrived at when he
described the place in which we are gathered, as an
institution created for the purpose of obtaining
"ripe scholarship in Hebrew, the Biblical and Rab-
binical literature, with which should be connected

THE BETH HAMIDRASH 209

original investigation and research." This is a Beth
Hamidrash in the traditional sense of the word.

The remarkable thing about this will of the late
Mr. Dropsie is that, as I understand, it was conceived
by him so many years ago, when there hardly existed
any Jewish institution in this country which could
have suggested to him this idea of original investiga-
tion and research. Certainly times have altered in
this respect. But when Moses Dropsie began to
contemplate his plans which are realized now, we
had little thought of higher learning. We erected
places of worship of which we can be proud indeed.
We built philanthropic institutions which might
serve as a model to any community, but we failed
to progress to the Beth Hamidrash; we were indiffer-
ent to the strength — even religious strength — hidden
in original investigation and research, deeming them
as devoid of any use for the practical purposes in which
we were engaged.

Thank God, we have outgrown this stage and are
beginning to be unpractical. The Talmud in defining
the character of a city in contradistinction to a village,
perceives it in the fact that the former can point to
ten men of leisure. The Talmudical term is "Bat-
lanim," but it does not mean lazy or idle people, but,
as just indicated, men who are not, by reason of their
trade or handicraft, hammering away at the fabric
of the world, and who can thus afford to devote them-
selves to the higher spiritual and intellectual interests
of the community. Without a sprinkling of such
men, the place may boast of millions of inhabitants,
but a village it is and a village it remains. What the

210 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

Talmud calls a village, would in modern language
be called provincial, denoting a state of mind narrow
in its horizon, limited in its sympathies and self-
complacently doubting all except its own wisdom and
"hating learning for its own sake." It is just such a
society which is redeemed by these men of leisure.
They certainly lead also an active life — indeed, a
strenuous life. I remember to have read once in the
life of a famous English scholar, in which the remark
occurred that he wished the people who read a learned
book could form some adequate notion of the labor
involved in it. Sometimes a footnote of half a dozen
lines may involve days of study, the consultation of
dozens of volumes, written perhaps in half a dozen
different languages, and the reading of hundreds of
pages which had to be sifted and compressed into a
paragraph or two. Such a life is even more than
strenuous, and it can hardly be appreciated by one
who has never himself tasted either the joys or the
sorrows of research. But it raises the community in
which such impractical men live and where a home
is set apart in which they can follow undisturbed their
intellectual pursuits, out of the narrow and provincial
views of God and man which make us, as a rule, so
petty and so small. But, above all, what they do is
that they teach us how to think, or rather do the
thinking for us. Within recent years we have re-
peated a good many times the famous phrase, "to do
things." Has it never occurred to you that the time
has come when we should also have a few men at
least who would "think things?" This is the great
mission, to my mind, of universities and colleges,

THE BETH HA MIDRASH 2 1 1

consisting not so much in the producing of active
and practical men, but of men devoted to thinking
and contemplation — just men who brood over the
"secrets of grave sentences," which sentences, if you
examine them closely, you will find not only con-
cern the past, but may also decide for us the fate of
our present and future. Such men of the thinking
profession dare not be local, for their playground
is nothing less than God's world. They may have
little to say about town topics or topics of the week,
for they treat everything from the point of view of
eternity, which includes all time. This is especially
the case with the students who are occupied in
prophecies. Their extent is the universe both in
space and in time. The transient was, according
to our ancients, eliminated from the Scriptures,
even though it once formed prophecies. "It is the
Book of the Generations of Man; embodying a
history of Humanity written in advance," as a modern
savant expressed it.

And think only of the vast apparatus which is now
brought to bear upon the study of the Bible. Whole
civilizations, such as the Egyptian, the Assyrian and
partly also the Greek, lasting for thousands of years
and each ruling in its turn the whole of known human-
ity, are enlisted by the student of the Bible as auxil-
iaries of the great document of humanity.

And this great history of the world is constantly
expanding when you add to the Bible the post-
Canonical productions of Judaism. This is a great
literature indeed when you consider its great past,
its long history, its affinity with so many schools of

2 1 2 SEMI N A RY A D DRESSES

thought, Oriental and Occidental, with which it has
come into contact during its long career in various
countries, its vast jurisprudence, civil and criminal,
its tremendous collection of precedents in the Re-
sponsa, its liturgy, its poetry, sacred and secular, its
devotional and mystic literature, Such a literature
not only deserves, but demands the attention of the
scholar and the specialist and requires men of leisure,
free from all other cares, to teach and to expound it.
But apart from the spoken word, there is also the
written word. Whilst the former is represented by
the lectures of the professors in the classroom, the
latter is given to the world by means of scientific pub-
lications. The former can only reach a few, the latter
may have the world for its audience. This is the rea-
son that the most representative universities and col-
leges have their various periodicals or series of pub-
lications, to which each department contributes its
share. The Dropsie College made a beginning in this
direction with the Jewish Quarterly Review, which is
now in its second year, and which is edited in con-
junction with students belonging to other institu-
tions. Its purpose is to advance the cause of Jewish
learning in those departments for which neither the
regular theological periodicals nor the various other
learned societies make sufficient provision. It also
endeavors to serve as a model to young students, es-
pecially Jewish students, in their scientific work.
James Russell Lowell expressed himself once in the
following words : ' 'We have a vast amount of imported
ignorance and, still worse, of native, ready-made
knowledge to digest, before even the preliminaries

THE BETH HAMIDRASH 213

of such a consummation can be arranged." The con-
summation of which Lowell thought was the higher
type of citizenship and freedom. The consummation
which the editors of this Review have before their
eyes is that of establishing some standard of the
higher scholarship or of original investigation and
research. Matters may have improved since Lowell's
time. But the Millennium has not yet arrived, and it
is still important to combat all kinds of ignorance,
including "encyclopaedic ignorance" — and to show
that smartness and verbosity which are by some con-
sidered a virtue in other walks of life, are not the
instruments with which parables and prophesies of old
are treated. The knowledge of these, or, for that
matter, of any subject worth knowing, can only be
achieved by hard work and exclusive devotion to the
topic in hand and a careful study of the authorities
bearing upon it, written with all the gravity and sense
of responsibility which men bring to bear upon other
questions involving really vital issues. In brief,
we try to train by models of genuine scholarship,
serious scholars and devoted students. I do not belong
to those who think that scholarly work must of
necessity be dull or heavy. We have instances
of brilliant writing and delightful reading furnished
by men who are accepted by the learned world as
the main authorities in their respective subjects.
But brilliancy and delight must not be obtained at
the expense of accuracy and exactness. Moreover,
there are subjects such as grammar, etymology or
questions of chronology and lexicography, or the
collection of variae lectiones offered by the collation

214 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

of versions and texts which can only be treated in a
dry and matter-of-fact manner. Yet they are as
indispensable to the philologian as time tables to the
traveler. They are not pleasant reading. They are
rather disconnected, as somebody said who was
studying dictionaries, but you can never reach your
destination or the goal of high learning without
doing your share of them.

I may further remark that long experience has
taught me that the student who has never undergone
the discipline given by the editing of an ancient
text or the writing of a serious commentary to an
ancient classic, where the smallest detail has its
meaning, and where even the blunders of the Scribe
convey at .times most startling lessons, will never
acquire that sense of responsibility and scientific
conscience which alone go to make the real scholar.
Industry and hard reading may enable him to compile
a useful manual or readable history of a certain given
epoch in modern or ancient times; but there are no
elements of permanence in such work. You have
always the feeling that you are in the presence of
a mere reporter, whom you never take quite seriously
and are prepared to abandon altogether as soon as he
is contradicted by the next "dealer in information."

Now, I have said that in learned publications it
is aimed to have the world as one's audience. But
if the world is to share their benefits, these publica-
tions have to remain strictly impartial. Pure learn-
ing must stand for no party, nor must it have any
particular cause to defend. The Quarterly remains
true to its program and strictly avoids all polemics,

THE BETH HAMIDRASH 215

though this may rob it of many an incisive or slash-
ing article which would at least enjoy the applause
of one party. And it is just because of this strict
adherence to the principle of impartiality that this
Review will in time become the common platform
of all parties. Please do not misunderstand me. I
am prepared to stand up for my principles and to
defend them with all my power. I am grateful to
God that I have still some bias in favor of Judaism.
I possess nothing of that Mandarin politeness which
congratulates a fellowman of a different creed on
the superiority of his religion, so much superior to
the religion in which he himself was born and bred.
I rather congratulate myself in the old manner
that I am a Jew. The boast of non-sectarianism in
matters of religion does not impress me. In most
cases, the man who claims this gift means nothing
else but that he forms a Sect for himself. But I
have also a strong prejudice in favor of unity, if not
among the different sects of the country, at least
among the scholars and students of the various col-
leges and learned institutions in the different sections
of the community, longing for some common platform
on which they may meet on equal terms in an amica-
ble and brotherly spirit. And this is only possible
through such periodicals of pure learning as have no
other purposes but to seek and to establish the truth
by means of approved scientific method. It is in this
manner that this Beth Hamidrash, in conjunction
with other Botte Hamidrashoth, or colleges and acad-
emies, will prove a real strength. It is only this
strength which insures peace in the end.

HUMILITY AND SELF-SACRIFICE AS THE
QUALIFICATIONS OF THE RABBI.*

THE occasion for which we have gathered here
to-day needs no special explanation. The
presence of Faculty and Students in their academic
dress tells you at once the purpose of our meeting,
though we are not in our own precincts, It is one of
those holy convocations which, for many years, has
become a regular feature in the community, when
degrees are conferred upon and prizes awarded to the
students, and Directors and Faculty bear witness
to this solemn act. Of late years our Seminary
Hall has proved too small to accommodate all those
who wished to attend the Commencement Exercises,
and it is in deference to public opinion, expressed
many a time, that we make our appearance in this
Lyceum to-day.

Now, here we are, and if the few remarks which I
am about to make, because of the more central loca-
tion of the place from which I speak, should reach
wider circles, I would certainly not object, but they
are mainly addressed to my friends, students of the
Seminary and students of the Teachers Institute,
upon whom the degrees were just conferred.

These remarks suggested themselves to me by
the contents of the Scriptural lesson read yesterday.

*Address delivered at the Graduating Exercises of the Seminary,
June 2, 1912.

218 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

As you know, a considerable portion of it dwells
upon the subject of the apportioning of elders and
leaders in Israel, but I am referring in particular to
verses 16 and 17 of the eleventh chapter of Numbers.

"And the Lord said unto Moses: "Gather
unto me seventy men of the elders of Israel, whom
thou knowest to be the elders of the people, and
officers over them; and bring them unto the taber-
nacle of the Congregation, that they may stand there
with thee. And I will come down and talk with
thee there: and I will take of the spirit which is
upon thee, and I will put it upon them; and they
shall bear the burden of the people with thee, that
thou bear it not thyself alone."

My friends, mark well the closing words of the
quotation just given: "And they shall bear the
burden of the people with thee." I had already once
had occasion to quote the words of a Jewish sage in
antiquity, bearing on the subject. He was sending
out disciples to take up their position in the com-
munity. But he warned them that it was service and
labor which awaited them, not mastery and dominion.
For indeed, they would have to bear the burden and
the cares of a whole community. They would be
responsible to God and man for their actions, and
whatever happens, it is the leader who has in the end
to give account and reckoning. "If you see a genera-
tion," our sages teach, "which is constantly on the
decline, go and investigate the Judges of Israel."
And the burden becomes the heavier in a community
like ours, in which, because of its youth, the Rabbi
has to spend so much time on organization work,
and in which this organization becomes doubly heavy

QUALIFICATIONS OF THE RABBI 219

and full of obstacles, owing to the heterogeneous
elements of which the community is composed. These
elements hail from all the corners of the earth, were
bred under different conditions, were trained in dif-
ferent schools, each of them possessing its own customs
and usages, its own etiquette, and its own ways of
thinking, and each of them expecting the leader to
be led by them exclusively, and to have no other de-
sires, no other aims, but those sanctioned by them.
One of the earliest experiences of Moses was when he
beheld two men of the Hebrews who "strove together."
The last two words just quoted have become a text
with many a mediaeval writer, and they are still
striving. Indeed, I think that this is the first experi-
ence which any man makes on leaving the academic
halls and descending for the first time into the arena
of life. Two Hebrews are striving; two sections in
the community are striving; two parties in the
synagogue are striving; and very often it is more
than two. It just depends upon the composition
of the community, their antecedents at home, and
the variety of homes from which they hail.

My friends, I know that it is hard work to pacify
all. But do not forget that the Rabbi is expected
to have faith in Israel, even as Moses had. Better
times are bound to come, and you are young enough
to hope for such times. For your comfort, I will
only remind you of Turkish Jewry in the Fifteenth
Century or thereabout, which forms the nearest
approach to such conditions as you will be called
upon to grapple with. The Fifteenth Century was

220 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

the age of "Pogroms" all over the world, and the
newly established Mohammedan Empire in Constan-
tinople was virtually the only one which not only
granted the Jew a certain amount of liberty, but
practically invited the Jews from all over the world
to come there and enjoy these liberties. But they
hardly began to settle when the strife began. There
were the native Jews who had their own ritual ; there
were the German immigrants, coming largely from
Bavaria, who had also their own ritual; there were
the Hungarian Jews, there were the Italian Jews,
especially from Sicily, there were the French Jews,
especially from the Southern departments; there
was also a sprinkling, as it would seem, of Jews from
Russia and other Slavonic countries; there were a
little later the Spanish, or the Sephardic Jews, but
these were also divided into half a dozen rituals,
or Minhagim: the Minhag of Aragon, the Minhag of
Barcelona; the Minhag of Tudela; and others of which
no record has come down to us. And there were also
the Jews of Portugal who, though practically coming
from the same part of the world as their Spanish
brethren, considered themselves as their superiors and
held aloof from them. How they quarrelled! They
quarrelled over the taxes, as each community had
to pay its quota of the tribute to the government;
they fought over the ritual, each community insisting
on retaining it in its integrity; they quarrelled over
the Rabbi, or Preacher or Maggid; sometimes they
quarrelled over the so-called "Spreader of the Torah,"
or head of the College. The Responsa literature of

QUALIFICATIONS OF THE RABBI 221

the time is full of such litigations and disputes and
controversies. But in a generation or so we see them
blending into one large harmonious whole. In the
end, higher culture, superior learning and gifted
leadership overcome every obstacle. Men arose,
great in the Law, great in mystical lore and great also
in statesmanship and in philanthropic enterprise.
They endowed schools, they erected synagogues,
they even established Hebrew presses, and their be-
neficent influence extended far and wide, creating new
centres of Judaism. Great women also contributed
their share. It is enough to mention here the names
of Donna Gracia Hannah Mendesia, a millionairess,
a statesman and a philanthropist on the largest scale,
in whom her contemporaries saw Divine Mercy
revealed in human form. She is described as "the
glory of Israel." She founded schools, she established
a Jewish press and devoted herself to deeds of mercy
and benevolence which reached even her enemies,
"and rescued many of her nation from the depths
of endless misery, poverty and sin, led them into safe
places, and gathered them together in obedience to
the precepts of the true God." Thus they built up
the House of Israel anew.

This may happen in this country, too, provided
you are animated by the spirit which was upon Moses,
which is the spirit of self-sacrifice, and giving yourself
up entirely to your work. Moses was the Prophet,
as we are told, who gave his very life for Israel, hence
the Torah is called after his name: The Torah of
Moses. In other words, no message to Israel will

222 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

ever succeed in which the messenger thinks less of
Israel and more of himself.

Now, when about to write this address, I was
struck by the following sentence quoted by a famous
author of the last century:

"At twenty-five," he remarked, "a generous
soul only seeks to sacrifice its life. It asks of Heaven
and Earth only a great cause to serve with great
devotion; love and strength are superabundant."

My friends, you are about the age just described,
perhaps a year or two more or less. You have even
the advantage that you need not seek for a great
cause. Heaven has already assigned this to you.
It is the cause of Judaism, which is great and sacred
enough. But, can we, in our generation, speak with
the same certainty of the generous souls prepared
to sacrifice their lives as the author just mentioned
spoke a century ago? Following the example of
Moses, the injunction given to every man aspiring
to leadership was, "Give your very lives for the com-
munity." Have you ever realized that it is this which
is required of you in your sacred calling? The great
misfortune is that we live in a time in which words
and terms have become so stereotyped, so technical,
and so mechanical, that they have become soulless
and meaningless. One is almost inclined to exclaim
with old Johnson, "Sir, free yourself from cant!"
Take the words "sacred calling," as applied to the
Rabbinate. Is it a sacred calling, indeed? Has
it not through faults, not your own, become reduced
to a mere profession, a comfortable office, a snug
berth, in which men spend their lives along a certain

QUALIFICATIONS OF THE RABBI 223

routine. You may call such a career practical and
even respectable, but the last thing in the world
you can call it is sacred. The old Jews were very
sparing with the Hebrew equivalent of sacred,
which is t^np as a rule; when applied to a person,
they meant by it a martyr. Are we made of the stuff
of which martyrs are made? Do we not rather engage
in a profession or accept an office in which martyrdom
is more or less out of place? You have given me no
reason to doubt your sincerity and readiness for
things great. But the spirit of the time may prove
too strong for you, so that you may also indulge in
phrases which have a very unctuous and solemn
sound, but have ceased to mean anything.

Just to take one more example: We constantly
speak of ourselves as a nation of Priests and a people
with a mission, but we never pause to ask, where are
our Priests, and where are our missionaries? Where
are our Parishes profiting by our priestly calling? And
where are the converts giving evidence of our mis-
sionary activity? Now, I frankly confess that I am
not in the least troubled by the fact that the Chinese
or the Japanese are not yet Monotheists. But we
want missionaries for our own people who are con-
stantly drifting away. We want teachers for our
own youth to instruct them in the word of God. We
want students who will devote themselves to the
cause of Jewish learning and continue the work of
the old Yeshiboths in a new country, after new meth-
ods and with more scientific discipline, if Jewish
scholarship is not to disappear altogether. We want
Rabbis to organize new congregations and to raise

224 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

the old ones from the sloth of indifference and the
vice of strife into which they have fallen. We want
further, as the Rabbis expressed it, men of power and
strength, to grapple with the disintegrating elements
among us, to whatever party they may belong,
whether to those who seek their salvation in levelling
down Judaism to the commonplace of a cheap
universalism or to those who, to use a famous phrase,
"serve the Lord out of spite." And all this can only
be done by young men and young women of "love
and strength in superabundance," forgetting every-
thing, even themselves and having no other cause
at heart but that of Israel.

I have spoken of the office of Rabbi, as one mean-
ing service, not mastery and dominion. The word
"service" need not deter you. It is the highest title
which Judaism knows in connection with your holy
office. "Let Moses rejoice in the gift of his portion;
for thou didst call him a faithful servant." This
feature is closely connected with another, also
mentioned in yesterday's Scriptural lesson. It is
that of mjj? or meekness, or rather humility, which,
according to our Rabbis formed the very calling, or
mission of Moses. It is the spontaneity of action
and suppression of our ego, which does not know when
it shines; indeed, puts on a veil when by some acci-
dent it becomes aware of such a possibility of shining.

It is only the man possessing this humility, who
can become the faithful servant of a great idea or
ideal, otherwise he will soon serve himself.

My friends, our earlier Rabbis were in the habit
of saying that it was the terrible and continuous

QUALIFICATIONS OF THE RABBI 225

deprivation caused by constant persecution and
Galuth which has devoured many a good quality
among us. I need not dwell on this point. The
truth of this is manifest enough. But I am afraid
that it may equally be true that in modern times it
is the lack of this great quality of humility and the
wish to shine which is the source of no less evils. It
has especially wrought destruction among men who
are about to engage and are engaged in the sacred
calling. We are not satisfied to be the faithful ser-
vants, but desire to be the lords and masters. We
wish constantly to shine. Everyone is building an
altar for himself, as the old expression is, and bitterly
resents every attempt towards unity. Whatever
happens, his light must not be put under a bushel,
even though this light may obscure Judaism itself.
He is not the servant of the law, but is constantly
endeavoring to be the lord of the Law. He must
always be in evidence, whether by his strange actions,
or by his peculiar theories. It is almost pathetic to
look upon the craving after publicity which has be-
come so prevalent among us. Some ancient sage
said that every day in which he had not performed a
righteous action, he considered as a lost day. I am
afraid that the sickly craving after publicity has
become such a passion with us that some consider
that every week in their lives in which their names
had not appeared before the public as dead. To
what sensationalism, either in action or in speech,
such a hankering leads, I need not explain.

My friends, remember the word of our sages:
"They will assign to thee what is thine: they will

226 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

call you byname and place thee in thy seat. No man
can touch what really belongs to thee, and there is no
forgetfulness with the Omnipresent." The man who
is really in the service of an ideal is not thinking of
himself. Judaism is great enough to fill out all the
heart of man. The service assigned to you is plain
enough; it is to teach Judaism and, as I had occasion
more than once to say: Your teachings must be of
a positive nature, the Jewish Scriptures, the sacred
language, Jewish tradition, Jewish law and ritual,
Jewish doctrine and Jewish history. Polemics should
entirely be avoided. It is the positive statement,
strengthened by the life and devotion of the preacher
which wins the hearts of men in the end. Other sub-
jects, whether un-Jewish or non-Jewish, you had
better leave alone. Make also a point of teaching-
Jewish ethics, devotion to the country, devotion to
duty, loyalty, honor, honesty; all these virtues are
taught by Judaism and in Judaism, but do not deceive
yourself that you will help Judaism much by becoming
exponents of topics belonging more to the Lyceum
than to the Synagogue. Above all, bring heart and
enthusiasm into your sacred task. Jewish history
will inspire you with all the enthusiasm you are in
need of. What a wealth of great men and great women
we have had; how courageous they were when it was
a question of religion! Teach your congregants to
admire their devotion, their loyalty and their heroism.
Point out to them what an inheritance we have and
that, as a fact, instead of boasting of our progress,
we are ethically still living in the afterglow of what
we so disdainfully call ''Ghetto-Judaism." And
further, point out what will happen when this after-

QUALIFICATIONS OF THE RABBI 227

glow will entirely disappear and darkness will settle
upon our memory and past. To take a modern slo-
gan, "do justice to the Jew," but also to Judaism, to
his history, to his past, and his memories and his
destiny. Do it yourself and do not invite outsiders
constantly to do so. "Justice to the Jew" has become
a regular topic in our papers and our speeches, and
I am sorry to say that both preachers and laymen in-
dulge a little too much in it. If we are not sufficiently
humble, we ought at least to be too proud for such
things. Can you imagine an ancient Jew, with all
his degradation, inviting strangers to give their
opinions about Jews and Judaism? As far as I had
occasion to observe, such invitations have, as a rule,
the very opposite effect than that expected by those
who solicit these opinions. What happens is some-
thing the reverse of what occurred with Balaam. He
was invited to curse, and remained to bless. We
invite them to bless, and not very seldom they curse.
In brief, do not employ artificial means to strengthen
your position in the community. Judaism need not
be advertised. Judaism needs to be taught. It is
not the highest praise for a Rabbi that he is invited
to preach in some church, or that he has succeeded
in procuring some high ecclesiastic or statesman to
preach in his synagogue. If you succeed in getting
the most exalted personage of the United States or
a candidate for the Presidency to preach in your
synagogue, you have only shown your ability of
"doing things," as the phrase is. But have you ever
thought that it does not help Judaism with thought-
ful men? It rather reflects upon our sense of religious
delicacy, upon our confidence in our own cause, or

228 SEMI N A RY A D DRESSES

even self-respect. And least of all do such successes
in the Rabbinical career give evidence of our devo-
tion to the great Law "to walk humbly before God."
You must never forget that even the sermon is not
altogether an end in itself. To a certain extent, it
is a preparation for prayer, teaching the Congrega-
tion to pray and how to pray. As some Rabbi said,
"Any homily which cannot be converted into a prayer
is a misfit," and this applies both to teaching and
preaching.

My friends, I have spoken of the spirit of Moses,
but so much abuse has been with the word "spirit,"
contrasting it with the latter that it will be well that
I conclude with the words of the last Prophet: "Re-
member ye the law of Moses, my servant, which I
commanded unto him in Horeb for all Israel, the
statutes and judgments."

Remember ye, my friends, Rabbis and teachers
gathered here, these "statutes and judgments." It
is these statutes and judgments which you have to
teach. General phrases about law and legalism are
out of place. We have sufficiently indulged in the
"recall." It is now the time to build up and to teach
positive Judaism and to remember and to remind
that the laws and the statues are the very life and
substance of Judaism. And this teaching again must
be imparted in the spirit of meekness and humility,
even as Moses did. And further, remember that it
is only the consciousness of being a servant of God,
wholly abandoning yourself to the sacred task which
is before you which will make your activity a bless-
ing. May the Divine Presence rest upon the work
of your hands.

THE ASSISTANCE OF THE PUBLIC.*

THIS is an historical occasion, as we are now to
celebrate the tenth commencement of the
re-organized Seminary. The occasion is, therefore,
an auspicious one. To apply a Scriptural metaphor,
"The Tenth shall be holy unto the Lord." And so we
have gathered here to confer degrees upon a number
of young men who are to devote their life to the
sacred calling of the Rabbi, by preaching holiness
and all that appertaineth to it.

Historical occasions invite to meditation. The
first subject of our meditation shall be the past.

I have spoken of the re-organized Seminary. But
it is only meet and proper that on this occasion
should be first mentioned the original organization
of the Seminary, of which our institution is an out-
growth and a development. Last year, the branch
in Philadelphia celebrated the twenty-fifth anni-
versary of its original foundation, and I had the
opportunity to speak of this interesting anniversary
in public. By the blessing of God, we have still
many of the survivors who were present at the
meeting at which the establishment of a new school
for the training of Rabbis was first resolved upon.
May God prolong their lives to rejoice with all of
you at the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary.

But we have especially to recall here some of the

*Address delivered at the Graduating Exercises of the Seminary.
June 8, 1913.

230 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

names of those who have gone from us. I am thinking
of the Rev. Sabato Morais, the original founder of
this institution, whose saintly character, whose un-
obstrusive piety and whose loyalty to principle will
always remain an inspiring influence in the Seminary;
of Mr. Joseph Blumenthal, as the President of the
Board, who toiled and labored to maintain the
Seminary under the greatest financial difficulties;
and, further, of Dr. Alexander Kohut, who was
just as great as a Rabbi :n the pulpit as he was a
Professor in the classroom, and whose connection
with the Seminary, in the capacity of teacher, gave
lustre and standing to our institution. All these
names we record here to-day for good, and their
memory shall not pass away from among those who
are connected with the Seminary in their various
functions and offices.

More difficult I find it to speak of the near
past. I am referring to the last ten or eleven years,
during which I have had the honor to preside over
the Seminary.

I know of nothing more distressing to a man
whose life has been spent mostly in academic sur-
roundings, and who has never been initiated in the
gentle art of self-advertisement, than the occasional
necessity of speaking in public of an institution
for whose activity he is more or less responsible.
However, I imagine that I owe it to my colleagues
and to the Seminary to say a few words also
about this period.

Our work has been a hard one, considering the
want of uniformity in the training of those applying

THE ASSISTANCE OF THE PUBLIC 231

for admittance, the unenviable conditions of the con-
gregations to which the Seminary has had to appeal
and, finally, the great divisions among the people
engendered by the extreme tendencies of the various
parties, be they Reform or Orthodox, which could
never understand a frame of mind that refused to be
labeled by the names they wished to attach to it.

Now, I do not wish to dwell on details. I shall
not enlarge here on the number of our Rabbis occupy-
ing various pulpits — mostly Conservative pulpits —
all over the country; nor on the flourishing condition
of the Teachers' Institute, a regular outgrowth
of the Seminary, which recognized the need of trained
religious teachers long before the public at large
became awake to it; nor shall I take up your time in
giving you a description of our unique library. Suffice
it to say that the Seminary has, with the aid of its
great benefactors, within this short space of time,
been able to build up one of the greatest Hebrew
libraries in the world, so that the youngest of the
libraries among Jewish seminaries is now one of the
richest in manuscripts and rare prints.

All these are facts which can be proved statis-
tically. But there are some things more potent than
facts, and these are tendencies and ideals. To be
brief, I will only mention the most prominent of
these. The first was the creation of a conservative
tendency which was almost entirely absent or lay
dormant in this country for a long time. Its aim was
to preserve and to sustain traditional Judaism in
all its integrity and, by means of the spoken or

232 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

written word, to bring back to the consciousness of
Jewry its heroic past, which must serve as a model,
if we would have a glorious future, or any future at
all; but, at the same time, to remain in touch with
our present surroundings and modern thought, and
to adopt what was the best in them and, above all,
to make use of modern method and system.

The next step was to create a school of Jewish
learning, which should embrace all the departments of
Jewish thought, and give it that scientific thorough-
ness and finish which alone deserves the name of re-
search, as well as enable Judaism to compete with,
and to combat those hostile intellectual forces which
are often more dangerous to us than pogroms and
direct persecution. In both these enterprises, the
Seminary has succeeded beyond all hope. The con-
servative tendency, which recently began only as
a mere pious wish, has now become a reality. It
permeates all the country and affects (unconsciously,
it may be) even those who never tire of scolding us as
re-actionaries. As to Jewish learning, it has become
a fact. American Jewish scholarship is now a recog-
nized factor all over the world; and you will hardly
find at the present time a Jewish library of conse-
quence, whether here or abroad, whether private or
public, in which the Seminary is not represented by one
publication or another emanating from our faculty.

But we are only at the beginning of our work.
The experience of the past ten years, if it has brought
to our mind most vividly the nature of the difficulties
which we have to conquer, and they are many and

THE ASSISTANCE OF THE. PUBLIC 233

great ones, has also opened to us such a wide vista of
possibilities and hopes as no other Jewish community
has to show. New York itself forms the largest
Jewish community recorded in history, while the
country in general, with its wise form of government
and liberal institutions, is, at present, the only place
on our globe where Israel can dwell in security and
look forward to a great future. If there is a spot
in the world where Jewish learning, which has so
often migrated from land to land, should at last
find a resting-place and develop freely in accordance
with its own laws, it will be America. If the labor
will be great, the reward will be greater. To prepare
for this future, it will be the duty of the Seminary
not only to continue on its path, but even to raise
the standard of its program of teaching, and to in-
crease its requirements, both for applicants and gradu-
ates. This is the right and the privilege of every
progressive institution of learning, after the lapse
of a certain period, during which it has fairly taken
root in the community.

The desired standard is to be found in the Scrip-
tures. It is given with reference to the first appoint-
ment of judges and leaders in Israel, whose mission
it was to give decisions to the people who come
"to inquire of God." There we read:

"And thou shalt teach them ordinances and
laws, and shalt show them the way wherein they
must walk, and the work that they must do."

The second clause of the verse is generally inter-
preted to refer to the works of "loving kindness,"

234 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

or what we would call social work. But, as you see,
the knowledge of the "ordinances and laws" comes
first and forms the basis of all. This was the mental
equipment of the Judge in Israel who afterwards
became the model and standard for all the spiritual
leaders of Israel in history. Seminaries can teach
ordinances and laws or better, as the original Hebrew
has it, "Toroth," a term comprehensive of all Jewish
thought, whether deposited in the Scriptures or in the
Talmud, whether it finds its expressions in the les-
sons of Jewish history and Jewish philosophy, or
Jewish poetry and Jewish mysticism. It can, further,
give some direction in regard to social work, in so
far as it is connected with the Torah. But the teach-
ing of the Torah and the spreading of its knowledge
is, and will remain, the Seminary's first and paramount
duty. I know that we live in a time and under con-
ditions in which social work has become an important
factor in the life of our communities, and am some-
times even inclined not to press the question of
knowledge to its full claim, when I see in a young man
a bent of mind which makes him useful to do, as the
phrase is, good work as Rabbi. But we must never
lose sight of the Toroth, which is the primary object
of seminaries. Nor must the Rabbi lose sight of
it. And I implore you, my young friends even after
you have entered office, never to allow a day to pass
without devoting a certain amount of time to the
acquiring of the knowledge of the Torah. If it should
happen that a certain number among you should be
so carried away in the zeal for the Torah, as to engage

THE ASSISTANCE OF THE PUBLIC 235

in original research, and write some great book on
some Jewish subject, it would certainly not be a
calamity. American Jewry is now strong enough
to afford a few real scholars in the ranks of its clergy.
Such scholars elsewhere prove, as a rule, an ornament
to the church to which they belong, and the Syn-
agogue should not remain behind in this respect.
They are the men who provide their denomination
with ideas and ideals, which are converted into small
cash by the weaker brethren before they reach the
public. There is room in the Synagogue for all sorts
and conditions of Rabbis, but the rabbi-scholar must
not be allowed to disappear if Judaism is not to be
reduced to the straits of a mere ranting sect, if our
places of worship shall not become settlement houses
in disguise, and our seminaries mere sociological
institutions. In Judaism, everything must emanate
from the Torah and culminate in it. We cannot
live entirely for the fleeting moment. We have duties to
the past and to the future, and these duties can only
be accomplished by raising the standard of knowledge
of the Torah in the Rabbinate. To achieve this end,
we must, however, have the assistance of the public.
As you have observed in the citation given from Exo-
dus, this command as to the qualification of the judges
was given in answer to a need felt by a people "com-
ing to inquire of God." Unless such a need is felt in
our times, the Seminary will never be able to do its
full duty. The public must feel the need of a learned
rabbi, so as to enable us to increase the years of study
in our institution. There must be a demand for the

236 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

knowledge of laws and statutes, in other words, of
the Torah, and all that appertains to it, so as to give
the better scholar the better opportunity in life and
the greater field for his work. The Jewish public
must begin to show this interest in its learned insti-
tutions and aid it in its task by the material and moral
support, which it has always shown to philanthropic
institutions. If the Seminary is to develop on the
lines begun thus far, it is absolutely necessary that
it should have the disposition of larger means than
hitherto. Thus, it is important that a "publication
fund" should be created, enabling the faculty to give
to the world annually, at least, a volume or two of
scientific production. We want also more scholar-
ships and more valuable ones that would enable us
to keep the student for some longer period in the
Seminary. The age at which young men are now sent
out to conduct the spiritual affairs of congregations
is certainly too early and is against all precedent.
We want Fellowships to encourage original research
among our alumni, immediately after graduation.
We have men who give great promise in this regard,
but we are unfortunately not in a position to enable
them to continue their researches without immediately
taking up practical work. We want, further, dormi-
tories for our students. The longer I live in this
country and the more familiar I become with the
conditions, economic as well as spiritual, the more
convinced I am that such an arrangement is abso-
lutely necessary to make the work of the teachers
effective, and the life of the students fairly comfortable.

THE ASSISTANCE OF THE PUBLIC 237

It is high time that American Jewry should recognize
the claims of the Jewish student, generally called in
Jewish literature, "the Sons of the Torah." Thus
far, we have treated them as step-sons. It is only by
the co-operation of the public and their sympathy
with the student and his work that a knowledge of
the Torah will again become the criterion of the
Rabbi, that religious education will become effect-
ive as it should be, and that harmony and mutual
understanding will be brought about in the various
sections of the community. Or, to speak in biblical
language, forming the conclusion of the passage
quoted from Exodus:

"If thou shalt do this thing and God command
thee so, then thou shalt be able to endure and all this
people shall also go to their place in peace."

HIS MAJESTY'S OPPOSITION.*

AT THE request of the Board of Directors of
the Jewish Theological Seminary of America,
at the wish of my colleagues, as well as following my
own inclination, I have come here to offer you our
congratulations on this auspicious occasion, the dedi-
cation of the new buildings of the Hebrew Union
College. It is a pleasure to me to have seen this great
edifice with its commodious halls, its well-equipped
library and its fine classrooms, erected to the glory
of God, and at the same time forming a monument
sacred to the memory of the late Dr. Isaac M. Wise,
the founder of this Institution. I remember to have
read once, in a book by an early American writer,
who complained of the want of distinguished men in
this country, and of the lack of reverence to the few
great names we do possess. These buildings, bearing
the name of one of the leaders of Reform Judaism
in America, removes this reproach. It shows that we
are now beginning to learn the meaning of reverence
and authority, for even Reform Judaism cannot live
without authority.

I here take the opportunity of putting on record
my thanks to the family of the late Dr. Isaac M. Wise.
I had not the honor of knowing the head of the family,
who had already been taken from us before I removed
to this country, but I had the pleasure of making the

*Address delivered at the Dedication of the new Hebrew Union
College Buildings, Cincinnati, Ohio, January 22, 1913.

240 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

acquaintance of Mrs. Wise very soon after my arrival
in America. And I acknowledge here with thanks
that both she and her sons, as well as other members
of the Wise family, always treated me with uniform
kindness and attention. And this in spite of all my
heresies regarding Reform Judaism and other theologi-
cal frailties symptomatic of my want of sympathy
with reform tendencies, of which I have never made
any secret.

My pleasure is not spoiled by hearing and seeing
so much here from which I of necessity differ. Indeed,
if I were in agreement with you, I would have been
deprived of the pleasure of being here today ; at least,
in the capacity of President of another college pur-
suing, to a certain extent, different aims and endeav-
oring to realize them by largely different methods.
Least of all would I, a mere student, without the
least forensic ability, have a right to speak in this
distinguished gathering consisting of so many great
scholars and orators, as your illustrious President
and other Rabbis here who have grown old in the
service of the Synagogue and famous for their gifts
of oratory and speech. But there is also another
consideration. Probably you all know the way in
which some English statesmen speak of their oppo-
nents in the Parliament, referring to them as His
Majesty's Opposition. This sounds like a paradox,
yet it contains a deep truth, implying as it does that
both His Majesty's government as well as His
Majesty's opposition form one large community,
working for the welfare of the country and the pros-
perity of the nation. The same principle may also
be applied to theology, there being, under Providence,

HIS MAJESTY'S OPPOSITION 241

room also for the opposition party, which has its
purpose and mission assigned to it by history. Of
course, there are exceptions, but generally there is
hardly any phenomenon in Judaism in the way of
sect or movement which has not served a certain
purpose in the divine economy of our history.

For opposition there must be, owing to the
difference of temper and temperament, the difference
of training, the difference of surroundings which no
process of schooling can entirely obliterate, and the
difference of opportunity. Of course, it will always
be a question as to which is which ; we Conservatives
maintaining that we are His Majesty's Government
and you His Majesty's Opposition. But this is one
of the differences. For reduce your differences as
much as you want, and, indeed, I hope and pray that
the difference of aims is not so deep as we sometimes
think, the fact remains that wre are unfortunately
divided both in questions of doctrine — at least
certain doctrines — and even more in practice. But,
thank God, there are still a great many things and
aims for which both parties can work in perfect
harmony and peace, and unite us. To mention here
only two: There is, first, the question of Jewish
learning, which concerns us all. This, as has often
been pointed out, can only be accomplished by the
Jews and for the Jews. No outsider can do it for us
even when representing the most liberal point of
view, for there is such a thing as a Jewish liberalism
and a non-Jewish liberalism, as my friend, the
learned President of this College, knows as well as
I. To this, any student keeping pace with the pro-
ductions of theology, philosophy and history will

242 SEMI N A RY A DDRESSES

bear evidence. We have thus to do our scholarship
for ourselves. I had only lately an experience of
this fact. In the course of my studies I found it
necessary to read a certain book dealing with the
geography of Eastern Europe in the tenth century.
You would think that with such a book on such a
neutral subject one might feel safe. But it was full
of venom and hatred giving evidence to the anti-
Semitic tendencies of the author. The most amusing
thing was that the subject of his special attack in
whom he discovered so much Rabbinical confusion
and Talmudic aberrations, etc., was Paulus Cassell,
who became converted to Christianity some fifty
years ago. But there is a practical side to this ques-
tion, touching also the larger Jewish public. I am
thinking especially of the problem of text-books for
our teachers of religious schools and educated lay-
men. At present we recur to works written or com-
piled by Christian authors. This must not be allowed
to continue. This class of books, which should have
the purpose of imbuing our children with loyalty
and devotion and attachment to Judaism, should be
composed by ourselves. Christian works on the same
line will not help us to bring up our children as Jews.
We cannot have our love letters written for us. We
must write them ourselves, even at the risk of bad
grammar. And this is a work in which both parties,
realizing the nature of the problem, can work together.
This is a specimen of work for the Jew and by the
Jew. But there is also the great work which Judaism
can do for humanity at large, in which both parties
can combine. It is only sufficient to mention here the

HIS MAJESTY'S OPPOSITION 243

terrible atrocities perpetrated under the eyes of
Europe in the Near East. Men, women and children,
all non-combatants, are slaughtered by the thousands
every day, their number amounting to half a million
already, according to the estimate of the newspapers.
And yet, no real moral indignation is seen anywhere.
We simply put away our papers and enjoy our break-
fast as if nothing had happened. We have become so
infatuated with the doctrine of the survival of the
fittest that we have lost all sensibility to the great
moral catastrophes which are passing before our very
eyes. And the more philosophy, the more heartless
we become. The world is thus in need of new instruc-
tion, and this instruction, as history has taught at
various epochs, as, for instance, in the Reformation,
can only come from the Old Testament.

The Fatherhood of God has always been taught
by Judaism, but this is a time in which the aspect of
the Holy King, and the King of Judgment, who not
only reigns, but governs, should be emphasized. As
my friend, Dr. Kohler, has expressed himself in his
recent very interesting essay on the subject: Die
Naechstenliebe in Judenthum:

"Nun, ich moechte als Theologie die Liebe nicht
missen, aber ich verlange als Jude, erst Gerechtigkeit
und dann Liebe."

("As theologian, I should not like to miss the
principle of love, but as a Jew I expect first justice
and afterwards love.")

These great principles of God's holiness, God's
justice and God's governing the world, are to be
especially taught now. And they must be taught

244 BOOK OF ADDRESSES

for years and years to come. The whole of Jewish
literature forms a commentary to it; the whole of
Jewish history forms an illustration of it; the whole
of Jewish life should bear evidence to it. And in
this work we can all combine in teaching. But in
order to teach, we must first learn and practice.
And this is the purpose for which colleges are estab-
lished. And thus may God's blessing be upon this
College, among all other colleges of Catholic Israel
^KW1 hb3, in which these great truths of Judaism
shall be taught and learned, and then proclaimed to
the world, in all their purity and in all their applica-
tion to the different and various departments of life
and thought.

In conclusion, I wish also to thank Dr. Kohler, the
President of this College, as well as all those gathered
here, for the kind reception which has been accorded
me. I was really touched by the honor you have
shown me. May God reward you for this act of
Gemillath Chasadim. "For my brethren and com-
panions' sakes, I will now say, Peace be within thee.
Because of the house of the Lord our God I will seek
thy good."

"LOVINGKINDNESS AND TRUTH."*

MY FRIENDS: — It is a source of great pleasure
to me to be with you on this auspicious day,
& privilege which was denied to me last year. For
this change in my condition, I am deeply grateful
to Almighty God, who kept me alive and has pre-
served me and enabled me to reach this season.

My first duty would be to congratulate you on
behalf of the Faculty and myself on this great occa-
sion, which enables you to enter on the sacred call-
ing of Rabbi. The nature of this sacred calling has
been sufficiently discussed in the class rooms. Every
lecture delivered there, whether it be on the Sacred
Writ and its commentators, or on the Talmud and its
cognate literature, or on historical documents and
philosophic and theological works by Jewish thinkers,
ought to have impressed you with the magnitude of
your task and the solemn character of your respon-
sibility. It is a peculiar world into which we have
endeavored to introduce you. This world, generally
called Judaism, sometimes also, to take a somewhat
more concrete term, the Synagogue, is a world within
a world, or rather a Sanctuary, symbolizing as the
Tabernacle of old, Creation and the Universe, even
whilst its long wanderings through the "Wilderness of
the nations," renders it a veritable epitome of the
history of mankind. The Torah is the "Book of the

* Address delivered at Commencement Exercises of the Jewish
Theological Seminary, June 6, 1915.

246 SEMI N A RY A D DRESSES

Generations of Man" or "The history of mankind writ-
ten in advance;" whilst the great Hebrew Rabbinic
literature developing from it, forms the contemporary
chronicle of the noblest and the most sublime thoughts
of Israel during the long period following the con-
clusion of the Canon. But as with the Levites of old,
it is upon you to carry on the service of the Sanc-
tuary, to make its symbolism intelligible to the
laity, to perpetuate its history, and to preach to the
world at large its ideals and aspirations.

And now, a glance at the present and the im-
mediate future. We live in awful times. It is a
world in conflagration. We cannot divert our eyes
from it. We dare not remain indifferent. Any man,
to whatever party he may belong, whatever his
descent may be, who does not, when reading his
morning or evening paper, feel sometimes as if his
heart would break at this terrible suffering of human-
ity— in which Israel is the greatest sufferer among the
nations — must, to say the least, be classed among those
whom the late Mr. Gladstone described as having
come into the world with a "double dose of the
original sin." The situation can only be depicted in
the words of the Prophet: "Blood and fire and pil-
lars of smoke," preceding the great and terrible
Day of the Lord. An ancient Jew would have per-
ceived in it the travail of the universe, ushering in
the rebirth of the world, or to use a term which is
now greatly in vogue, the regeneration of humanity.
What shape this regeneration will take is difficult
to say; but if all signs are not deceiving, if the world
is not to sink under its own burden, if humanity

LOVINGKINDNESS AND TRUTH 247

is not to witness such a reversion to chaos as fol-
lowed the breakdown of the Roman Empire, and
similar world catastrophes — then it will not be in
the direction of the religion of valor. It will be a
return to the religion of Israel, whose great invoca-
tion in the most solemn prayer of the most solemn
day of the year is "The Lord, the Lord God, merci-
ful and gracious, long suffering and abundant in
lovingkindness and truth." HOST TOP! 311

My friends, it will be a chastened humanity
which will emerge from a destroyed world, strewn
with the debris of broken idols and shattered ideals
on which we have been spending our energies for the
last decades. Strength, force, astuteness and similar
virtues, desirable in themselves as manifestations of
vigorous manhood but dangerously bordering on
violence and brutality, will be less valued than
meekness, gentleness, sweetness of disposition and
humility. It will not be the strong man, but the good
man, the affectionate man, who will form the desired
goal of parents and pedagogues. Organization itself,
this great achievement of our age, will largely give
way to generous impulses and broad sympathies. I
by no means underrate the value and the importance
of organization. It certainly turns mobs into socie-
ties and societies into powerful units. It is for the
adult what method and system are for the young in
the school. But it can decidedly be overdone, and
if not under the control of a strong moral principle,
touched by kindness ai>d goodness, modifying the
severity and its tendency to inconsiderateness, it is
more likely to further passion than compassion.

248 SEMI N A RY A D DRESSES

The same is true of efficiency, which has constantly
to be qualified by fitness. To give an illustration
or two: A letter in the papers forming a part of the
controversy about a certain religious leader much
in evidence now, bore the heading, "Coarse, but
shows Results." Here you have a case of efficiency
lacking in fitness, with a vengeance. To speak of
Rabbis in particular: it may happen that the Rabbi
is successful in attracting large audiences, and in
having every pew of his synagogue sold, and in see-
ing his name in the press every day of the week.
This may be termed efficiency. But if he is not at
the same time a God-fearing man, an observer of the
Jewish law, living an unselfish life, and giving evi-
dence of his humility and meekness, he is certainly
unfit for his calling, and all his activity will result
in destruction.

Above all will this regeneration be felt in the
Synagogue. The pulpit will cease to be an institu-
tion of self-glorification, boasting of our successes
in various departments of secular endeavor. This is
sufficiently done by our friends outside of the Syn-
agogue, and even more often by our open and dis-
guised enemies, such as Werner Sombart in his
book, "The Jew and Capitalism," or John Foster
Fraser in his "The Conquering Jew."

Nor must we indulge in emphasizing too much
the question of our mission. Such topics are only
provoking of criticism. To have a mission, but never
to be able to point to the missionaries and their
achievements, is an awkward position to say the least.
I would not even advise you to enlarge too frequently
on the feature of nationalism. It is certainly justi-

LOVINGKINDNESS AND TRUTH 249

fied as a protest against Paulinistic tendencies or
as a safeguard against assimilation. But the most
sublime expressions of Jewish nationalism are to be
found in the Bible and the Prayer Book. Here a
specimen from the latter, "O Guardian of an only
nation, guard the remnant of an only nation, and suffer
not an only nation to perish, who proclaim the unity
of Thy name, saying, 'The Lord our God, the Lord
is One.' ' But the nationalism of the purely secular
kind as taught by certain philosophers and historians
within the last two generations leading to the excesses
which we are witnessing now all over the world had
better be relegated to the lecture platform. Jewish
nationalism can be interpreted only in the light of
Jewish History and pure Jewish thought. Moreover,
the world is sure to combine against the fanaticism of
modern Chauvinism just as it did combine in the
eighteenth century against religious fanaticism. And
Judaism should ponder deeply before it entirely
identifies itself with this sort of exaggerated secular
nationalism. An ancient Jewish moralist had the
maxim: "If you are in the humor of praising, praise
God; if you are in the frame of mind of blaming,
blame yourself." And I am certain that the time
has come when this maxim will be applied as much
to whole groups of humanity as to individuals.
Jewish nationalism is holy to the Lord, and any at-
tempt to sever it from the historical Jewish ideals
attached to the Biblical terms "God's People," or
a "Holy Nation," will fail in the end.

IDPI (Chesed) loving-kindness, and HDS (Em-
eth) truth, must again become the subjects of in-
struction in our places of worship. The great truth

250 SEMINARY ADDRESSES

in need of being realized at the present crisis is the
fact of sin. Once more we should repeat the formula
of the liturgy: "Verily we have sinned." I lay the
emphasis on we, as certain views are now in the air
recalling to our minds the Scriptural adage:

"The foolishness of man perverteth his
way; and his heart fretteth against the Lord."
(Prov. 19:3.)

We do not fret directly against the Lord, but we
fret against religion. "Religion is a failure, else this
terrible catastrophe would never have occurred."
This is the statement made on all sides. But is it re-
ligion that is a failure? Have we been living in a really
religious age when this calamity overwhelmed us?
Has there been any doctrine which has remained
unassailed during the last two generations; any
portion of the Scriptures, which has escaped heartless
dissection; any religious symbol or ceremony which
was not slighted more or less? Almost every ideal
sanctioned by tradition and the consent of humanity
has been boldly challenged, whilst many a noble
sentiment almost inherent in the race and taken for
granted by humanity at large, has been ridiculed and
looked upon as an impediment to the perfection of a
misunderstood manhood. "Everybody at all familiar
with the trend of thought could feel that we're stand-
ing on a veritable volcano created by the upheavals of
the newest methods of "searching research" which
respects as little the new formulae, such as the cate-
goric imperative and conscience, as it does creeds and
dogmas." And now, when all the sources of our in-
spiration had been destroyed and laid dry, we expected

LOVINGKINDNESS AND TRUTH 251

religion to quench this world conflagration. The wife
of Job, as you know, said to her husband, ' 'Curse
God and die!" We blasphemed religion and wanted
to live. It proved impossible. It is this truth that
it has been we who have been the failure, not religion ,
which it will be your duty as Rabbis in Israel to im-
press upon your Congregations.

Where we mainly failed was in the attribute of
1DJ1 (Chesed). When speaking of Chesed, I am think-
ing of the term in all its connotations — kindness,
loving-kindness, goodness, mercy, affection, pity,
piety, forbearance, gentleness, gracefulness and gra-
ciousness. It is this Chesed as an emanation of the
Divine, which should become the prominent feature
in all our great Jewish enterprises. Charity, for
instance, must not be allowed to be converted into
a mere department of Political Economy. I have
read lately an article under the title of "Humanizing
our Charities." But humanizing alone will not suffice.
Charity must be restored to its pristine Divine
right, the only Divine right which a democracy
recognizes, and should be allowed to call forth til
those noble impulses in man which may be summed
up as the Imitatio Dei of the Jew. If our philanthropic
work cannot for practical reasons any longer form a
part of the activity of the Synagogue, as it was in
days of yore, it must not on the other hand be allowed
to become so detached from all religion as to obscure
entirely the feature of Chesed or the religious touch
which sanctifies the giver and elevates the recipient.
Indeed, the great danger of our age is the tendency
towards secularizing life and thought in all its as-
pects, even those aspects which originated in the Sane-

252 SEMI N A RY A D DRESSES

tuary, grew up with the Sanctuary, and thrived under
its shelter from time immemorial. The Sacred Writ,
it is maintained, is to be studied as a mere ancient
classic, not as a Torah of TDn (Torath Chesed) a gift
to Israel by Divine grace. Religion is to be taught as
a part of Hebraic culture, not as a discipline of life
for the sake of God or Torah lishmah. Jewish
endeavor in the line of Jewish settlements and
kindred social work is to be conducted on non-
religious lines, a peculiar sort of neutrality, but
certainly not a friendly neutrality. Silence in re-
ligion means hostility. The synagogue itself, affec-
tionately called by our ancestors Bmp DIpQ (Makom
Kadosh) a Sacred Place, is to be largely stripped
of its sacred features. It is to make room for the
Institutional Synagogue in which the worship of God
by reason of its organization must become in the
end subordinated to the material service of man and
his amusements.

It is this constant encroaching upon the rights
of the Sanctuary, leaving no room for the sacred
and the holy, which landed us in a materialism, the
consequences of which are only visible now. Chesed
is banished from the world. It is a world with-
out pity and without piety. The task of the Rabbi
as the guardian of the Sanctuary, is to cry a halt
to these encroachments, and to restore the Sanctuary
to its own rights. The task will not be easy, and
the less so as such a restoration of the sacred and
holy in our midst would imply a censure of many
an activity of ours as not less a subversion of many a
philosophy bearing upon man and his destiny in
which we have revelled until now. As Lincoln ex-

LOVINGKINDNESS AND TRUTH 253

pressed it in his famous letter to Thurlow Weed with
reference to his Second Inaugural Address, forming
practically a confession of the national sin: "I be-
lieve," he wrote, "it is not immediately popular.
Men are not nattered by being shown that there
has been a difference of purpose between the Al-
mighty and them." But you must do your duty
even at the risk of not pleasing everybody. The
rights of the Sanctuary are clear. Its province is
sufficiently marked, and its mission at this time is
sufficiently urgent.

The world cannot exist without a Sanctuary and
cannot live without Chesed, even as it is said : "Surely
goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of
my life, and I will dwell in the House of the Lord
forever."

LD 21-100W-7 '

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