D

CONFERENCE SERMON.*

RABBI MOSES P. JACOBSON.

"Shall we bring forth water out of this rock?" (Num. xx, 10).

The responsibility with whose imposition you, my brethren, have honored me in appointing me to deliver the sermon for this Silver Anniversary of our Conference I accepted, while readily and appreciatively, nevertheless with much misgiving. Expression vital and dignified, yet withal conventional, should probably mark a congratulatory solemnization of this character. But if it be with such proprieties that I am expected to carry off this occasion, I must say, as David said to Saul, I can not proceed with such investiture; it is altogether too heavy for me. I trust that I am not mistaken in the assumption that it is not an oration, but a message which you want.

To him who was the founder of our Conference and its two great parent-institutions no one pays a more reverencing homage than I do in the silent worship of my being. My youth was nourished in the sunshine of his favor. He was my instructor, my counsellor, my inspiration and my friend. I felt the geniality and recognized the greatness of his character. Admiringly and gratefully I realize the grandeur of his accomplishment. But with the years it is more and more impressing itself upon me that the essential value of Dr. Isaac M. Wise for modern Israel consists, not so much in what he did, as it does in what he was in that splendid intrepidity of his with which he broke

*By special action of the Conference, a statement was ordered printed declaring that Rabbi Jacobson's sermon reflects his individual opinions and does not express the views of the Conference.

with his past and, forsaking the shelter of his forebears, led their latest children another magnificent stretch forward along the path of their soul-visioned destiny.

And it seems to me that now, with twenty-five and more years of our loyal building up and perfecting of the constructive work he has bequeathed to us, the time has come for us-while still maintaining the institutions he has left us to change the emphasis of our honor for his performance into a tribute to and an emulation of the man, and to become reformers even as he was a reformer-to reform even upon his reformation, and, if it needs be, to the reversal even of our historic principles and politics.

Of that situation in Israel which is ever uppermost in our thought when we are in conference-namely, our people's attitude towards and interest in our religion-my diagnosis is wholly different from that which the majority of us make.

I have a tremendous respect for the Jewish layman. I do not find him lacking in that indefinable something which we call spirituality. I do not know what this thing spirituality is. The things of sea and sky and common earth, the things of sustenance and of sex, and the graded relations of human society make up the entire sum and substance of all our possible thought, action and sentiment. What other things than a selection of these things of sense can engage the consideration, enterprise and enthusiasm of the spiritual man I can not understand. We are all of us, if you please, simply different kinds of sensualists. But we take this hypocritical term spirituality—a word wholly devoid of analyzable meaning—and frame with it an indictment against a whole people-our people.

The people of Israel are as virtuous a class as there is in civilization. They have sweet homes, pursue useful vocations, make honorable livelihoods, labor on large lines for the welfare of their cities, are interested in the politics of their states and the problems of their countries, and are foremost and generous participants in all causes seeking the relief of poverty, suffering and disadvantage. They are money-makers-as all must be at this time in civilization's day. For money is the life-blood of the public weal. And he who succeeds praiseworthily in money

making, but demonstrates that he is a healthy artery of the social life, functioning for its wholesome maintenance and growth.

With all this community of work and interest knitting our people into an intimate and enthusiastic bond of brotherhood with the whole world of mankind, they maintain, as do all other classes in civilization, a separate union with one another for the purposes of religion. These their religious purposes our people respond to magnificently. Their temples of worship do them credit. I presume it is your experience, as it is mine, that proportionately to our numbers our religious services are attended as largely and with as interested congregations as are those of any other denomination. It is the easiest thing in the world to get the synagog crowded the year round. The hypnotic influence of our holidays, the special services appointed by the hundred and one social reform and philanthropic organizations of the day, the sermons on the sensations of the hour, all bring forth thronging audiences.

But then there comes the lull, the interval of sober reflection, when the thinking man, who can not be fooled all the time, asks, "Where is the distinctive Jewish message in all this? Why have you brought us away from the Egypt of our necessary occupations and our wholesome diversions into all this wilderness of words, thought, theory and excitation to leave us still Jewishly unslaked? Give us here our Jewish vivification if you would have us not Jewishly die in the presence of the very luxuriance of our Jewish acclaims."

Our more definite answers to this interpellation of our laity having been found wanting, we are putting the emphasis today on our historic consciousness. If our people will but intimately acquaint themselves with our wonderful history, if they will but come under the influence of its magic spell, the essence of Judaism, impalpable and indefinable like electricity, will current its quickening impulse through their consciousness and will burst before their vision in a blaze of convincing glory.

But these are the days of analysis. We can no longer be put off with mere phrases and with plausible analogies.

We may prate as we will about the survival of the fittest.

But if it be that only like thistledown we were blown by the winds of circumstance and only like thistledown have proven ineradicable, what pride can we find in our survival?

Nor to many a thinking Jew is our Jewish record of perpetual martyrdom any longer a source of much gratification. Had that martyrdom been a splendidly invited martyrdom, had there been by our people a brave denunciation of some enthroned falsehood, or an heroic espousal of some castigating truth, or had there been by Israel a death-defying propaganda of her faith, there might be some relief and some reason for pride in our dreary chronicles of suffering. Our martyrs, however, were born into their religion, as the leopard is born with his spots. No more than the leopard thinks of passing on his spots had our martyrs thought of passing on to others their faith. And with this their inescapable religion they were caught by their persecutors, now in one cul-de-sac and now in another, and were despatched as easily as scurrying mice in a trap. It was not the martyred, but the unmartyred people that escaped. Is this a survival of the fittest? In these self-assertive days is this a history to glory in?

And what has our martyrdom served the world? It is not only the Christian Warner, but likewise the Jew Ruppin that has said that since the fall of Bethar Israel as Israel has contributed nothing of its own to civilization, that its great luminaries, Philo, Maimonides, Gebirol, Jehudah Halevi, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Heine, were given not by Israel to the world, but by the world to Israel.

And even were our history ever so glorious, still why should it be our inspiration for today? Are we insensitive to Mazzini's fine admonishment: "With eyes fixed on the future we must break the last links of the chain which holds us in bondage to the past, and with deliberate stages move on"? We have freed ourselves from the abuses of the old world; we must now free ourselves from its glories. And Ruppin very properly reminds us that Germans, Italians, Frenchmen, etc., have magnificent heritages of history, and yet men of the highest character among them, like Carl Schurz, for instance, have discarded their traditional historical consciousness for another historical conscious

ness without incurring the slightest charge of moral turpitude. Ruppin himself finds the Jew's only reason for Jewish loyalty and enthusiasm in the fact of a peculiar Jewish racial genius. We have certain inherent Jewish talents, he says, valuable exceptional qualities, which seem to be strangely like the qualities secured by artificial breeding. They disappear in promiscuous assimilation. By rigorous inbreeding they become emphasized and strengthened. The Jew should preserve and promote these his racial characteristics for the benefit of mankind.

If this were all true, it would be an excellent reason for the great body of Israel, if it had the coercive power, to prevent the secession of its members. Or it might be a sufficient warrant for the nations of civilization to pass marriage laws safeguarding the purity of so valuable a race, as now they pass marriage laws to prevent the general race deterioration.

But upon the individual Jew in whom the race consciousness has become so weakened that love or ambition will supersede it, what moral right of restraint is there in any such a consideration as this? And with what ethical inspiration will you reach him? Here are two factors, heredity and environment, together determining the destiny of the individual. Wherein does morality or any other higher principle enter, saying to him that he must in his life allow to the one a control superior to the other?

Again, there are those who would have us quaff at the fountain of romanticism for our Jewish inspiration. They tell us that there is a beautiful ceremonial discipline making for virtue and ideality which is accessible to the Jew only as a Jew.

But when we urge this plea we are making the naive assumption that a ceremony is a form more or less deliberately instituted to support or protect some higher principle or purpose. Whereas the actual fact is that no so-called ceremony, of persistent or any extensive range of observance, was ever instituted for any purpose beyond itself. In reality there is no such a thing as a true ceremony. Every so-considered ceremony is the native efflorescence, in fact, it is the fruit of a particular view or theory of life. And its value is not token, but intrinsic. When its life's theory is dead the ceremony in time inevitably perishes.