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by Isaac Leeser
"Hear, O Israel, the Lord, our God, is the Lord
one."
One of our great luminaries* has said, "Ancient
Judaism, therefore, had no symbolic books, no articles of faith. No one
was permitted to swear to symbols, no one was called upon to swear to
articles of faith; nay, we have no conception of what are called
adjurations of religious belief, or test-oaths, and we must consider
them as inadmissible, according to the spirit of true Judaism.
Maimonides was the first to conceive the idea of condensing the religion
of his fathers into a certain number of principles, in order, as he
gives us to understand, that religion, like all other sciences, might
have its fundamental ideas, from which all the others are deduced. From
this merely accidental thought have originated the thirteen articles
of the Jewish catechism, and we owe to them likewise the hymn Yigdal,
and several good works of Chisdai, Albo and Abarbanell. These, however,
are also all the consequences which they have had hitherto. They have
not yet, thank God, been forged into fetters of belief. Chisdai contests
them, and proposes some alterations; Albo contracts their numbers, and
will admit but three fundamental articles, which agree pretty
nearly with those which Herbert of Cherbury, at a later period, proposed
as the basis of a catechism; and there are still others, especially
Loria and his disciples, the modern Cabbalists, who will not acknowledge
any fixed number whatever of fundamental doctrines, because they say:
'In our law all is fundamental.' Nevertheless, this controversy has been
conducted, as all controversies of this kind ought to be, with
earnestness and zeal, yet without hatred and bitterness; and although
the thirteen articles of Maimonides have been received by the greater
part of our nation, yet I know of no one who has declared Albo a
heretic, because he endeavoured to reduce their number, and to refer
them back upon rational principles of much greater universal
applicability."
We certainly agree in the main with the views here
advanced, that in the Jewish religion there is permitted the utmost
latitude of placing the foundation of belief upon any given number of
fundamental principles, whether they be the thirteen of Maimonides, the
three of Albo, or any other, be they more or less numerous, which any
one may hereafter offer to our acceptance, with proofs drawn from
Scripture. Our readers, however, must not imagine, that this diversity
of opinions or freedom in offering the same is at all productive of any
real difference of belief; on the contrary, the belief of all believers
in the Jewish religion is the same, the contest being merely as to what
principles should be supposed the basis upon which the code of
Moses rests for its support. If, for instance, it is asserted that the
Jewish religion has for its foundation the
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Belief in the existence of God;
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Belief in the existence of a revelation by this God;
and
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Belief in rewards and punishments for obedience or
disobedience to this revelation from God,
it does not say, that the expectation of the coming of a
redeemer is a matter on which we are permitted to speculate; but simply
that the legislation on Sinai is not based upon the reign of the
"prince of peace," because, if it were the will of God to
govern the world without the mission of this august personage, He could
do so, for aught we could allege. But without a belief in the Deity
there could evidently be no religion; without a revelation there could
be no responsibility; and finally, without rewards and punishments there
could exist no incentive for religious observance. Nevertheless, there
may be truths other than these necessary principles, ideas founded upon
the truth of God, and upon those institutions which He established of
his own free accord, and which, therefore, have become matter of fact or
certainty, because the Lord so willed it. Of this kind are the mission
of Moses, the promise of a Messiah, and the resurrection of the dead.
Let us explain a little. Although it was necessary that
God should give a law, this does not say that He was compelled to
deputize Moses; but having done so, and given us a record of the fact,
our denying or speculating upon the matter would be an act of unbelief,
and one which, if it could not expose us to be punished by men, since
matters of belief are not cognizable by earthly judges, would still make
us liable to be punished by the Being who himself sent his prophet with
his message of love and mercy; because where a man wilfully rejects the
light that is offered him, and placed of his own free choice obstacles
in his way, by which the attainment of righteousness becomes more
difficult, he offends against the Author of his being and of the
religion which alone can render his life happy and his death tranquil.
From this it follows, that, since the Bible declares Moses to have been
the chosen messenger of God, and pre-eminently endowed with divine
wisdom more than any other man, we are bound to place implicit credence
upon this assertion, and act according to the obligation thus imposed,
that of obeying the doctrines handed down by Moses, which this
conviction, of right, should ask of us, since no one equal to him ever
received a commission to repeal what he handed to us as the will of God.
So likewise the doctrine of the Messiah. As we hinted
above, it might have been that, had God not promised it, the world would
not have needed a special messenger who is to restore the universal
peace which was forfeited at the first sinning of man; this, assuming it
to be the intention of the Most High, might be within the range of
possibility by a thousand methods all within the scope of God's power.
But the prophets teach us a doctrine different from this; they tell us
that a time will come when something wonderful is to happen to the
peculiar people who were established, many ages before that time, the
preservators of the laws and code promulgated through Moses. The
establishment of universal peace, in short, is to be accomplished
through a peculiar personage descended from the Israelitish nation, who
is to effect for the same a restoration of the ancient commonwealth
first established at the going out of the original fathers of this
people from Egypt, by means of peculiar laws and statutes embraced
within the code, called the law of Moses, and accompanied by certain
rites and ceremonies which anciently constituted the public worship of
the Most High in the chief city of the Hebrew state.
The God who revealed himself to man and made known
through his accredited messengers these his intentions; and consequently
they have become a matter concerning which no one can consistently
entertain any doubt who truly believes in the truth of the biblical
records transmitted to us through a long line of ancestors. It will not
do to assert, that because the Jewish religion might be true without the
coming of the Messiah, we will not believe in his coming; for since the
promise has been made, it has become an integral portion of the things
concerning which we have been instructed, and as such it has become a
matter of credence, as being the intention of the Lord, just as the
Sabbath and other commandments have become matters of duty from no other
reason than that they have been ordained as the will of God.
How would it do for a believing Israelite to criticise
the biblical ordinances, and dispute their obligatory force, simple
because he could love God and serve his fellow-men without observing
them? We would certainly say, that it is but a poor exhibition of faith
to doubt of the positive duties which the Bible enjoins, although they
might not have been necessary truths; and with as much reason
must we say, that to presume even to cast a shadow of doubt upon the
hope of Israel in the ultimate fulfillment of all the good the Lord has
promised unto his people through means of the son of David, simply
because this mission is not an event absolutely necessary to the
existence of the divine law, is a refusal to be taught by the Lord, the
only Source of all wisdom and truth.
Let us turn to the doctrine of the resurrection. Again
we will say, that this idea is not one without which religion could not
have existed; on the contrary, if life were only limited to a mere
earthly existence, and all the reward and punishment were merely
confined to the duration of our days on earth, (much more now, as we are
taught to believe that the spirit will not die at the death of the
body:) the Lord would still have the means of rewarding or punishing
with temporal or spiritual visitations, as the case might be, whatever
acts are done in conformity with or in opposition to his declared will.
It was therefore not necessary that the body should likewise rise from
the dust to become instinct with immortal life, like unto the spirit
which dwells within it. But all this does not gainsay that the Lord so
promised it through his veritable prophets, that he would restore in the
coming future לעתיד לבא
the souls to the bodies of the departed, and to reward some with
everlasting bliss, and punish the guilty with shame and everlasting
contempt. That no one is able to explain the time when, and the manner
how, this wonderful event is to be accomplished, is no hindrance to the
faithful believer; he submits his reasoning power where he finds his
intellect insufficient to explain the wondrous might of the Creator.
This does not make him believe impossibilities, or things which from
their very nature cannot be true; but it induces him to believe where he
must see the power of God able to effect the end, although to him the means
are not self-evident. We therefore again say, that to deny the
resurrection is denying a principle laid down by the prophets,
especially Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel; and consequently such unbelief
is not becoming to, nay, is criminal in any one, how much more so in a
teacher of religion, who professes to be guided by the code of Israel.
We do not mean at present to do more than to introduce
the subject to the notice of our readers; but we mean to recur to it
very soon. All we meant to exhibit was, that the difference in respect
to the number of fundamental articles does not affect the belief
demanded of a son of Israel; and that it is one thing to say such a
matter is not fundamental, and quite another to assert that we do not
admit its truth and cogency for ourselves as believers. In very truth,
we, for one, hold that the whole of the Scriptures is fundamental; and
therefore we believe that all that is taught therein is necessarily
true, and matter of conscientious belief with us. Whatever we cannot,
with our present light, understand and explain, we set down as for the
moment only not apparent to our intellect; but this does not say, that
with an increase of light our views may not likewise become expanded,
and we be able to stand amazed at the brilliancy of the effulgence of
divine truths, where now we stand uninformed and bewildered, though
nothing doubting, as becomes inquirers after truth, as scholars in the
temple of our God and Teacher.
The articles of Maimonides, therefore, in whatever light
considered, are the pillars of the faith, and may be termed the columns
which support the roof of the noble structure of our belief. They are
true, whether regarded by us as fundamental or accessory; and as such
they are not to be doubted or disputed by any one who wishes to claim
affinity with Israel. It is certainly true, as Mendelssohn says, that
one cannot be called a heretic for not believing the whole of them
fundamental; but he certainly would be wanting in true faith were he to
deny or disbelieve the whole or any one of them. If such is the case
with individuals, it must be so in a greater degree with teachers of
religion; and though no test-oath can be demanded before entering upon
office from any Israelite; still, since the whole Bible is fundamental,
and consequently all the doctrines thence deducible are necessarily
true, no one ought to presume to teach otherwise, nor should the people
elect any one who teaches or proclaims publicly doctrines inconsistent
with the thirteen articles, or who openly denies their truth. At a
future day we mean to prove, by biblical texts, the correctness of the
received creed, as embraced in the Yigdal; for the present we
must close, this introductory article having already increased under our
hands to a much greater length than we had at first designed. |
