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A Sermon
Father of Israel! we have felt thy providence, we
have enjoyed thy bounty, and we are thy chosen servants to fulfil the
ends of thy rule on earth, to prepare the world for thy kingdom, and to
proclaim the message of salvation, until that happy hour when wickedness
shall close its mouth, and thy faith and thy law shall become the
watchword of all mankind. O glorious is such a lot! blissful is such a
mission! But now Jacob is lowly and Israel degraded, and the nations
imagine us stricken with darkness, and our mental vision obscured by the
veil of blindness, because we cannot discern truth in their errors, and
because we cannot forsake Thee our God, and the teaching of thy law
which Thou didst bestow on us. Yet Thou art the One who will raise Jacob
though he is now small and humble, and Thou wilt kindle anew the lamp of
thy anointed the son of Jesse, that the glory may dwell again in
Jerusalem, and much peace may be in her palaces. Yet whilst the ungodly
prevail many hearts become faint, and the unwise despair of thy coming
to save and to redeem thy <<480>>heritage. Be it therefore acceptable before
Thee to cause us to feel thy worship in our hearts, and guide us by
unerring tokens of thy mercy; that we may stand unmoved in the midst of
the assault of the stranger, and await in patience thy coming, when the
righteous shall rejoice and all the earth be glad in thy salvation. Yea,
aid and forsake us not; because we are thy children, thy people whom
Thou chose for the sake of the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, thy servants. Amen.
Brethren:
Were it that our nation had not received a
permanent mission, it would long since have been abandoned by Providence
to seek its fate as other people, become commercial or agricultural,
enslaved or independent, warlike or peaceable, civilized or barbarous,
as the progress of events might urge it forward, or it might have
disappeared altogether from the earth as a distinct race, just as it
happened to the Romans and Chaldeans, and many other nations of
antiquity, or modern times. But we find that our fate was not such, that
we were not left to chance to seek our position in the scale of
humanity; but an observer of the course of events will discern without
much labour a uniform thread running through our whole history, and this
is the religious element, which more than any other people places us
before the world as a separate and particular branch among the families
of the earth.
It is true that we are a peculiar race through our
descent from a common parentage; that our features and visage are
bearing a marked contrast to those of other men, so that the Jewish
physiognomy is readily distinguishable in by far the larger portion of
our members; but this does not, for all that, constitute the
characteristic of the Jewish people, and forms barely a mark of their
descent from a stock deriving its origin from a distant and foreign
land, and is very often shared by nations living under an analogous
climate to that which our fathers inhabited. Whatever physical
characteristics may be ours, however, could only have been preserved
unchanged through a close union among ourselves, and the exclusion of
all foreign admixture; for it would have been impossible to maintain,
for instance, the peculiar conformation of features which generally
denote the Jew, if he had derived his descent from all
<<481>>sorts of nations,
since in that case he would naturally be tinctured by the peculiar marks
of other races.
But how could such a union be maintained? You may
answer, By a prevention of foreign admixture. But it is very evident
that however this might have been possible whilst we formed a state of
our own in Palestine, with political power and an independent civil
government, which might, if it had thought fit, denied the entrance of
all foreigners into the state, as did the Chinese lately, and as do the
people of Japan to this very day, it would have been entirely impossible
as soon as we had lost our nationality, and became intimately mixed up
with the people of nearly every state under the sun, which did not
disdain to receive our wanderers in its boundaries.
Besides this consideration another one must present
itself to our investigation; it is this, that strangers were not
precluded from living in Palestine, and what is more, from being
received as members of the state, and even of families of Israelites;
there were restrictions and conditions under which citizenship in its
full extent, and household membership, could be obtained; but they were
by no means very difficult of attainment, and the way to a union with
Jews was left open to all who chose to become candidates for the same.
Whoever then says that Jews have preserved
themselves by their unsociable rejection of all foreign alliance,
assigns the effect instead of the cause for the mighty and wonderful
moral phenomenon which they present in the records of history; since the
causes of their, what many call, unsocial habits have to be sought in
the very principle to which they owe their being, and this is, as we
have said already, the religion which is theirs. We may freely say that
we are physically and mentally differently constituted from any other
people; we may say that we repel any approach to foreign alliance; but
we may safely deny that it is owing to a hatred of mankind, which
induces us to forego voluntarily our identity, or that it is a wish to
be singular which governs us in our seclusion; but it is only that we
have received a religion as a heavenly deposit, and which in preserving
it for us and our descendants, as our fathers guarded it for themselves
and us their successors, necessarily compels us to exclude ourselves
from a communion with strangers, which could in any way endanger in our
hands the possession of our ancestral faith and practice.
<<482>>
Were it indeed, that in the course of events, a
system had been evolved in all respects equal or superior to our own, it
would have been the height of folly to have continued in a state of
separation from the rest of mankind, at a time when we had neither
national existence nor a country to call our own; when our glory was all
in the past, and our wished-for home barely a deep-seated hope, burning
at times brightly, at times faintly, in our bosoms.
What however is it that causes the Israelite, even
him who is reckless in religion, and almost unthinking on his God, to
start back with horror when contemplating the thought of being lost in
his descendants to the household of Jacob? It is the deeply impressed
feeling that there is no law true but that proclaimed at Sinai; that
there is no god, beside Him who redeemed us from Egypt; and no saviour
save the One who has promised to show us mercy and goodness whenever we
shall return to Him and seek his favour in sincerity, in contrition, and
with humble prayer.
Yes, far may the Israelite go astray; but it will
embitter more than anything his dying hour, to reflect on the awful
position he is in towards his God and his people when he knows that his
children are cut off from the inheritance of the Lord, that they are the
uncircumcised of flesh and heart, and worship strange gods, and kneel
down at the stranger’s shrine. Whence is this horror? whence this
deep-seated dread at a loss of an inheritance which has no worldly
advantages to offer? which only holds out to its possessor days of
watching, and not rarely nights of anguish? It is that every son of
Jacob feels that he is of right and in truth an inheritor of Divine
favour in possessing a knowledge of the Unity of the Godhead, which was
announced in a multitude of visions and in the majesty of the thunders
of Horeb, to generations after generations; through which means also we
obtained an intimate acquaintance with a pure system of morals and rules
of worship; than which nothing holier, nothing purer, nothing truer, can
be imagined by man, like which nothing equalling it in holiness, purity
and truth, was promulgated elsewhere to the children of the dust.
Therefore it is that the Israelite fears losing his right in the
universal God, that he dreads being cut off from the inheritance in the
blessings which are promised to our race, should his children and their
descendants, in whom the ultimate hope of the world ought to be of right
<<483>>accomplished, not be numbered among the seed of Abraham, but be mingled
up with those who invoke gods that cannot save, or believe in prophets
whom the Lord has not sent. And how can such a one expect to rejoice in
the salvation of the God of Israel, should his descendants have been
among the persecutors of the faithful, and have been among those who
make heavy our burden during our captivity? if by his own voluntary act,
in joining himself or permitting his immediate children to join
themselves to the sons and daughters of the strangers, he has
deliberately removed himself from the household of Jacob? No, he cannot
rejoice, neither in anticipation nor in the accomplishment of the return
of the Lord to Zion in mercy and glory; and he has no right, no
inheritance in the goodness and the abundance of spiritual greatness
which shall be ours in the end of days, when truth shall triumph, and
when falsehood will vanish before the dazzling light of the divine
reason which will then illuminate the human mind.
Our race, I need not tell you, you know it, has
passed through trials the severest which any other ever encountered; it
has been tried in the sunshine of prosperity, and in the crucible of
poverty; it has been tempted in the days of national splendour, and its
constancy tested in the degradation of abject slavery and oppressions
without number; it has suffered all the vicissitudes of tyrannical
rulers, the wrath of man, the hatred of the whole human family; again,
however, it has been courted by words of flattery, which sound fair to
the ear, but break the faith to the deceived heart; it has been
attracted by bribes and promises of all sorts: and nevertheless it has
not ceased to be a distinct branch of the human family, though there is
no doubt that many strangers to our ancestry have by degrees been joined
to us, and learned to swear by the name of Him who dwells on high.
And in all these trials many have fallen off from
the parent branch; they were either allured by the freedom of gentile
manners, the absence of the burden of the law which they saw in others,
or they were terrified by the sorrows which they had to endure, and
sought for enlargement by denying their God and Saviour, and forswearing
their allegiance to his laws. I called your attention on a previous
occasion to the remarkable diminution to which we were subject, first by
the slaughter of millions <<484>>at the destruction of the temple, and
afterwards by the constant persecutions and legal murders by which it
was endeavoured to exterminate us. I do not remind you of this to
enkindle in your hearts a hatred of those not believing as we do; but
to impress on you, in all sincerity, that the world and its allurements
offer no safety to Israel.
You may be told that you are loved for the fathers’
sake; that you are admired because you had always the law in your
custody; but never believe that for these benefits to mankind conferred
by your religion, this religion is loved by those who have not embraced
it. The world and its followers look on you with a jealous eye, and they
would think no labour nor effort in vain, which would induce you to
surrender it, and if you would but be persuaded to become like other
men, and be no longer distinctive sons of Israel. The very fires of
persecution were kindled and blazed, not, as they said, to punish our
bodies, but to fit our souls for heaven; and though the stake is not now
invoked to effect this end, other means are not left untried to produce
the same result. Ours is a constant state of warfare with all around;
and we must therefore be constantly watchful that the holy citadel which
we are appointed to guard, suffer no injury from any inimical surprise,
let the danger come from whatever quarter it may.
But in so guarding, so watching your treasure,
there is no need that you should hate those on whom the fight has not
yet dawned; you are within the safe enclosure; you can walk with
security, surrounded as you are by the walls erected around you by
divine wisdom; you can therefore well forgive the wrong done you in the
ignorance of the proud and the prosperous; and if vengeance is to be
meted out for the innocent blood which has been shed, await in silence
the coming events, and your God will act for you, and his thunders will
not sleep when it is requisite for the benefit of all that they should
be awakened, and when his holy arm is to be bared for warfare against
the ungodly, before the eyes of nations.
Of one thing be assured, and hold fast to it as a
priceless truth, that the Lord of all spirits does not look with
indifference upon you and your fate; He watches, on the contrary, over
your destinies, and directs everything so that it may best contribute to
your preservation, the happiness of the world, and the furtherance of
his glory among mankind. You are his instruments;
<<485>>you are but as the
clay in the hands of the potter; He moulds you to answer to his wise
purposes; wherefore you should never presume to rise up in rebellion
against Him, and ask Him, “Wherefore dost Thou afflict us?” Were it that
uniform prosperity, a uniform security, a uniform state of peace were
the best for your spiritual development, it would all be accorded to
you, even as your soul desires. The very reverse of it, however, clearly
proves, that as yet you have not reached that state of perfection, or
that at least the world has not yet progressed far enough, to establish
the peace of Israel; that as yet the struggle for truth has to be waged
by you, either actively or in a suffering state; and that hence you must
acquire such thoughts yourselves, and inculcate the like in your
children and scholars, that you and they may be enabled to come out of
the contest with your faith untouched, and your confidence in the God of
your fathers undiminished.
Reflect that you are, by descent or adoption,
children of that glorious triumvirate which was commenced in Abraham,
which was continued in Isaac, and ended in Jacob, three names glorious
and bright amidst the greatest and brightest which the history of the
world presents to the admiration of men, and which demand of us to
follow them in the same path which has become their glory and their
praise. The world boasts of its heroes, its martyrs, its counsellors,
its kings, its leaders, its sages; it holds them up to be loved,
admired, and followed. And it is right that so mankind should be incited
to noble deeds, which scatter a variety over the dull acts of every-day
life, which present us something to live for, very different from the
ordinary every-day transactions which centre in self, and which often
work injury to all beyond the actor himself, and not rarely on him
likewise.
But have we not also cause to point to our ancient
progenitors as the illustrious examples which we should follow,
unflinchingly, bravely, fully, without regarding the consequences which
may thereby ensue to us? If Abraham believed firmly in the Lord, should
we not also believe, yea unto death, though our eyes do not behold the
fulfillment of the good predicted? If Isaac could be willing to be bound
on the altar, after he had himself with a full knowledge of his father’s
intention, carried the fire and the wood for the burnt-offering, without
murmuring against the <<486>>apparently arbitrary and cruel mandate of the
Supreme, though he had been designated as the one after whom Abraham’s
seed should be called: should we not also be ready to obey in much less
onerous commandments, the guidance of that holy Voice which speaks to us
through the pages of the blessed Scriptures?
If Jacob could go forth from his father’s house, as
an exile for the wrong done to his brother, though justified for thus
doing by this brother’s unworthy contempt of his birthright, which he
wickedly sold for a mess of pottage, merely to gratify the cravings of a
base appetite; if he could go forth among idolaters and live twenty
years away from all the endearing ties which bound him to his beloved
mother and revered father, and could he remain himself true and faithful
where all around was given to falsehood and error, and rear up his
children to love the God of Abraham, and to reverence Him who was the
Fear of Isaac; could he remain the favourite of God though the forsaken
of man, when he was by day exposed to the scorching rays of the sun on
the plains of Mesopotamia, and at night bedewed by the chill, damp, cold
mists which often scatter disease and death on the fields which spread
along the Tigris and Phrat, and yet always worship Him who appeared to
him at Luz, when he slept on the bare ground, with a rock for his
pillow, whereas he had been reared in ease and luxury, in the peaceful
tent of the patriarch of Beersheba; could Jacob remain true, though for
a wise purpose an angel sought to overcome him at the crossing of the
Jabbok, in a contest such as no mortal ever before waged, and he yet not
falter in his confidence in the Supreme’s protection: and should we
become faint-hearted at the first blush of trials, at difficulties which
a little well-directed energy and perseverance can so readily overcome?
should we doubt that a great and glorious destiny is before us, when so
much has already been fulfilled, when so much that was barely prophecy
in the days of the fathers, has actually been accomplished to the
letter?
And yet we doubt, we fancy almost, as did the
ancient transgressors, that the Lord has forsaken the land; we hesitate
in obedience at the first allurement, as though to sin were the
legitimate business of man on earth. But if the experience of past ages
is worth the least consideration; if the Bible in any way is a proper
guide for us to follow: we ought to be ashamed at the littleness of our
<<487>>faith, at the proneness to sin which we display on every occasion. It is
indeed unfortunate that we so little understand the teachings of the
Scriptures, or that we heed them so little when we do. Not so can Israel
be dignified; not so can we attain our proper rank as the favourites of
Heaven, as the children of salvation. On the contrary we ought steadily
to pursue the course which our fathers followed, and be neither swayed
by success on the one side to forget our accountability, nor be urged by
untoward events to let go of our innocence and seek for remedies in the
intercourse with the world, where no safety can be found for us. When we
are successful, let us look up with gratitude to Him who blesses the
seasons; and when evil betides us let us resort to prayer to lay our
case before God, and He will hear our cry and grant our request, if
thereby our happiness can be promoted, and refuse it should our
enlargement compromise the salvation of our souls.
The example of Jacob should herein teach us a
lesson of wisdom and piety. He had by the intervention of Providence
escaped the malevolence of his father-in-law, Laban the Aramite, when a
new danger threatened him in the approach of his offended brother, with
a mighty retinue, for those days, of four hundred warlike men, who
followed him. Jacob did not deviate from his course to his paternal
home, seeking safety in flight because he had been told to return to the
land of his birth, and that the Lord would be with him. Nor did he rely
on this promise as doing all for him, because he might justly fear that
the errors and sins to which man is liable, might have exposed him or a
portion of his household to punishment, through the instrumentality of
Esau, since the time that the revelation concerning his homeward journey
had been made known to him, in his late residence. He therefore resorted
to prayer as the only refuge for him, and all other afflicted ones in
the day of distress, and called on the Lord to protect him in that
strait in which he was, not for any merit in himself; because he averred
that he was unworthy of all the mercies and the truths which had been
bestowed on him; since he passed the river Jordan in his flight from his
father’s, with a simple staff for his possession, and how he had now
returned with two troops of cattle, in which at that time consisted the
wealth of the East, together with their necessary <<488>>attendants, and
blessed with a hopeful progeny of twelve God-fearing children. And thus
he concluded his prayer,
ואתה אמרת היטב איטיב עמך ושמתי את זרעך כחול
הים אשר לא יספר מרב׃
ברא׳ ל״ב י״ג׃
“And Thou hast said, I will surely do good with
thee, and render thy descendants like the sands of the sea which cannot
be numbered for multitude.”—Gen. 32:13.
Meaning that it was the unbought favour of God,
which had so far been fulfilled in the many blessings which he had
received, on which alone he relied to protect him from the threatening
danger, and he invoked it that any evil, which might be impending,
should through this means be averted from reaching the mothers and the
children, exposed as they were, without divine aid, to the expected
wrath of the long-offended Esau; since Jacob had too much cause to
suppose that, from his impulsive nature, he might inflict some grievous
injury on those who had not injured him, only because they were
connected with his brother by the ties of kindred. It is needless to
recapitulate the story of the reconciliation of the brothers, as it is
more simply and beautifully told than any one but the sacred historian
could do in so few words; enough, the prayer of Jacob was answered, and
he and his were spared to live and sanctify the Lord of hosts by their
faith and their deeds.
And as was the life of Jacob, so has been our
existence as a nation. Exiled from the home of our fathers, we have had
to mingle with persons and nations of beliefs differing from ours;
circumstances have constantly occurred to draw us away unto the path of
sin, and to forsake the Lord who had chosen us. Like Jacob too we have
been surrounded with perils, and many a time has the persecutor’s sword
flashed brightly over our heads, and in its descent it was made drunken
with the blood of the Lord’s saints, of those who lived not for
themselves, but for the happiness of mankind.
And even when the storm blew loudest, when the
waves rose to the most overwhelming height, was the voice of Israel
heard invoking the Lord of hosts to remember the covenant and the oath
which had secured to the ancients the protection of the Supreme arm,
against which all human efforts were in vain. And though notwithstanding
our prayers many perished, the religion which
<<489>>they defended, perished
not; and their blood in flowing watered the tree of life, so that it
bloomed the more freely, and that its shadow became more enlarged, so
that many more could refresh themselves by its fruits, and be sheltered
under its wide-spreading branches. And it flourishes and lives; and
though new insects have sprung up to injure its growth and beauty, they
will perish also, but the tree itself will live, and become again
renewed after the present danger.
For it is this over which the Lord watches; it is
this for which He has appointed us its guardians and keepers. But let us
not fail in being faithful, and we too shall each be blessed by the Lord
of our labours, and He will give us a portion and a name in his
sanctuary, a name of glory which shall not perish, and a reward of life
which shall never cease. Amen.
Kislev 13, December 8th, 5609. |
