|
(Continued from page 492.)
Let us continue our review of the object of the
Jewish religion, as we sketched it in our last. We
meant to show that there must be a weighty reason
for instituting a nation like the Israelites to be
in possession of a peculiar code of laws, which
constitutes them a people separate and distinct from
all others. We also wanted to exhibit that the
characteristics, by which we and our ancestors were
distinguished, have in them something so decidedly
individual, that we should conclude that a powerful
reason must exist for preserving our identity. In
other words, that Judaism and Jews stand in a
necessarily antagonistic attitude to gentilism and
gentiles, so that an amalgamation of the Jewish
people with the great masses is a thing not to be
thought of even when the time shall come that all
the nations of the earth shall acknowledge the main
features of our faith; not, let it be understood,
that we mean to cast a slur upon non-Israelites, but
only that we have received an especial appointment,
from which nothing can absolve us, and wherefore we
cannot, without becoming traitors to our destiny,
sever the link which binds us each and all to the
ancestral root of Israel.
We
do not mean to go into a disquisition to prove the
reasonableness and truth of the Bible; for in
addressing as we do <<530>>believing Jews chiefly,
who compose the great majority of our readers, we
must take something as the basis of our discussion,
and assume that this is undisputed; for though to
some it may be necessary that everything should be
proved, we must defer the peculiar arguments to
exhibit the authenticity of the Scriptures to
another and more fitting occasion. At present,
however, we must hasten to a conclusion of our
thesis, although much, very much, must be left out
which we should gladly have introduced. Let us then
revert to the Bible to see what God purposed in the
selection of Abraham and his descendants.
When the great Chaldean philosopher, the father of
all the faithful, first unfurled the banner of true
belief, the world was shrouded in a veil of
impenetrable darkness. Look at the monuments of
ancient Egypt, look at what China now is and what
she is said to have been from the beginning, look at
the Brahmins and their institutions as they are now
and probably have been for centuries upon centuries,
even assume, as some modern antiquarians wish to
assert, that the civilization of these nations
antedates the period of the flood as fixed by Moses:
and you will at once understand that a pure THEISM,
such as was professed by Abraham, a holy morality,
such as he introduced to mankind, did not, even if
it could, exist alongside of the idolatry, gross or
refined, however it may have been, which afflicted
Egypt, China, and India from their earliest history.
We
do not mean to go into particulars, as every one
having the curiosity may readily read works
referring to those primeval and other nations. One
thing, however, must strike the most careless
observer even, that no morality can at all compare
with ours; consequently it cannot be assumed that we
have at any time borrowed our mode of acting and
thinking from others; and that hence it is either
indigenous to our race or was an especial gift
conferred on it. The idea of its being the first
must be repudiated as not being borne out by
history; for either there was a universal knowledge
of right and wrong before Abraham, or it was
imparted to him. We are inclined to the belief that
a universal revelation of the principles of morality
is as old as the presence of man on earth, and that
it <<531>>was the great merit of Abraham and
whatever contemporary pious men then existed, that
they rejected the errors which had gradually usurped
the place of truth, and threatened at the same time
to extinguish it altogether.
Hence we are told in tradition that “at three years
old Abraham acknowledged his Maker,” which no doubt
means, that as man he clung to the traditions of the
existence of God which had been imparted to him by
the remainder of those who had witnessed the
destruction of mankind by means of the flood. But be
this as it may, we find Abraham maintaining, during
a period of a hundred years, in which he is placed
before us in the Bible history, one uniform course
of moral conduct, in adhering unswervingly to the
path of adoration of the ONE whom he discovered to
be the true Author of all things, either by his own
research or the tradition derived from others.
In
either case this was a great and meritorious thing;
for, if he could act and think in this way, why did
not others, equally well endowed or instructed,
follow the same career? What prevented the builders
of the Pyramids, the constructers of the halls of
Karnac, from adopting a comprehensive and
intelligible idea of the Godhead, instead of their
complicated system of folly and absurdity?
It
may have been something peculiar to the mind of the
Chaldean, and the few whom he brought over to his
mode of belief, which made this, train of thought
peculiarly congenial to them; but at best this is a
very unsatisfactory method of accounting for a great
mental phenomenon; since it is assuming too much to
say that one man, or at best a few, were, among all
mankind, alone capable of embracing a sublime train
of ideas. For our part, we confess that the
adherence of the Abrahamic family to the distinctive
feature of the unity of God, appears to us as not to
be explained on pure human possibility, or at least
probability, especially as we find that Abraham’s
own brother and his descendants, who remained at
Hagan in Mesopotamia, were idolaters. And so we read
in Joshua xxiv. 2, 3: And Joshua said unto all the
people, Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel, On
the other side of the river (Euphrates) dwelt your
fathers in olden times,—Terach, the father of
Abraham, and the father of <<532>>Nachor, and they
worshipped other gods. And I took your father,
Abraham, from the other side of the river, and led
him throughout all the land of Canaan, and
multiplied his seed, and gave him Isaac.”
We
refer to the whole allocution of Joshua in the
chapter cited, in which he recounts briefly the
establishment of the Israelites in the land of
Canaan by the evident interposition of Providence,
and then exhorts them to be true to their mission.
Now this very mission could only be accomplished by
their being isolated and distinguished from other
people and hence we may readily understand the
blessing to Abraham in Genesis xxii. 16-18, “By
myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, that because
thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy
son, the only one, I will surely bless thee, and
multiply exceedingly thy seed, like the stars of
heaven, and like the sand which is upon the shore of
the sea; and thy seed shall take possession of the
gate of their enemies; and in thy seed shall all the
nations of the earth be blessed, because thou hast
obeyed my voice.” Circumcision, a peculiar sign of
the covenant, had already been instituted; in this
Ishmael, too, had been included; still it was not in
him that the first blessing, pronounced in Genesis
xii., should be fulfilled, but in the son of Sarah,
who in the record of the voluntary sacrifice, in
which he bore so prominent a part, is called
Abraham’s only son, which means either as regards
Sarah, or the promise of future greatness as pointed
out in the passage under consideration.
In
now regarding carefully the predicted future good,
it will be found to be chiefly consisting in the
final clause, that in Isaac’s seed, which was
afterwards confirmed to Jacob, surnamed Israel, all
nations of the earth should be blessed; so that,
whatever may be this blessing, it was bestowed, not
for the sake of the recipients only, but for the
world at large likewise. We might, perhaps, allege
ignorance of the nature of this prediction, were it
to stand singly and unsupported on the sacred page.
But in recurring to the history, even of Abraham, we
shall find a clear exposition of it; for we read in
Gen. xvii. 4, “As for me, behold my covenant shall
be with thee, and thou shalt become the father of a
multitude of nations.” Ibid. 7: “And I will
<<533>>establish my covenant between me and thee,
and thy seed after thee, in (all) their generations,
for an everlasting covenant; to be a God unto thee,
and to thy seed after thee.”
The same idea is repeated in the next verse, where
the land of Canaan is secured to his children, and
the promise added, that the One who spoke to him
would be the God, that is, the acknowledged
Divinity, of his descendants. This now proves what
the Bible considers the greatest blessing—namely, to
be an immediate adherent of the Most High, and to
acknowledge no other being as having power and
dominion over and in outwardly-created nature, or
over the spirit which animates all. A simple
monotheistic idea is here held out as the greatest
blessing; in the whole narrative but ONE, an
emphatic I, is spoken consequently, no other
was taught unto the patriarch; and this faith is
held up to us as the foundation of all other
virtues, this belief itself being accounted as
righteousness, producing, as it must, the most
implicit confidence in the truth of the promises of
the Most High, there being no other to control or
interfere with the execution of his intentions.
If
now all nations of the earth are to be blessed
through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and as these men
never conferred, to the best of our knowledge, any
benefit through the means of great discoveries in
the arts, sciences, mechanical and agricultural
pursuits; and their descendants having confessedly
never ranked very high among the developers of new
inventions, which have for centuries been placed
beyond their reach, up to the present moment: we
must look for the possible fulfilment of the
prediction in a matter, through which not alone the
patriarchs, but their descendants also, have ever
been distinguished. We do not claim here any merit
of discovery, but the hopeful prerogative of
possessing a precious legacy of truth. There is, to
our view, nothing so true, if there can be assumed a
comparison in an idea so absolutely good as truth,
as that there exists ONE God, and no more, both
absolutely and relatively, He not being one by
comparison with another substantive being, but one
without any imaginable division or association, by
descent, reproduction, accession, increase,
diminution, association, addi<<534>>tion, or by
whatever other conceivable idea an object can be
rendered more or less than one undiminished or
increased entire whole. In everything else you can
imagine the corporeal or spirit substance to have
been at one time different from what it is now that
it had more or less power, energy, wisdom, wealth,
influence, virtue, vice, strength, &c. But of our
God we cannot predicate any such idea. He was always
as He is now, and will always be as he has ever
been. Go to whatever nation you will, they will
dissent in some degree from this pure ideal,
abstract, incorporeal, perfect Godhead; and
whichever people should be found admitting it to the
fullest extent, has derived it from us either
directly or mediately. But even where an apparent
acquiescence has taken place, you will find it often
so guardedly expressed, so surrounded with
limitations and arbitrary definitions, that it
amounts to absolutely nothing, and is at variance
with what we have been taught as a divine truth.
Consequently, as Israelites, we cannot coincide with
any such attempted qualified exposition of the
nature of faith, and must reject it as a pernicious
error, or a libel on simple truth.
Shall now all the families of the world be blessed
through us it must be by an adoption of what we
possess as an inheritance from our fathers, and
which, as yet, is not shared nor desired by them or,
in other words, we must believe that God has
predicted that through our means every human being
shall, at some future day, be brought to acknowledge
only an absolute unity in God, just as was
done by the patriarchs, and as we do who are called
by the name of Israel.
We
need not defend this view of the future which
Judaism demands of its followers; it interferes not
with the offices of good-will which one man owes to
the other, nor with any relation we bear to a
government or a state which professes different
ideas. We may entertain for ourselves what opinion
we think right and still never dream of injuring
those who differ from us; and no one differing from
us has, therefore, any cause to complain of our
opinions, whilst we do not interfere with the
corporal well-being of others. We regard not those
dissenting from us as enemies, not as those we are
authorized to hate or to per<<535>>secute, in order
to bring them over to our mode of thinking in order
to insure the salvation of their souls; but as
simply lacking the means of forming a correct
judgment in divine things. How far it is our duty to
contribute to their conversion by active means is a
doubtful question; but the greater part of
Israelites are inclined to the opinion that we are
required to do nothing but to live true to our
faith, and leave the gradual progress of things to
accomplish the remainder, since the changes which we
constantly witness in the development of historical
events, demonstrate that the transmutation of
religious ideas is constantly going forward, and
tending more and more to the point of conformity
with the belief of Israel.
In
fact, our history is very barren of examples of a
proselyting mania; and, unless we err, John Hyrcan,
the Asmonean king, was the only one who ever
demanded a conformity to Judaism, when he conquered
the Idumeans, which folly inflicted on us afterwards
the rule of the Herodian family, under whose cruel
sway and ruthless barbarism our hapless state sunk
beneath the fatal friendship, the faithless
protection, and the final triumph of arms of the
Romans. For our person, indeed we do not share the
horror of receiving individual proselytes, who, from
time to time, desire admission to the Synagogue, if
their motives are pure and disinterested, as, by
their reception, we, to a certainty, do not weaken
the brotherhood of Israel, and increase, on the
contrary, its numerical strength. Enough is,
however, apparent from the course we have always
pursued, that we do not think ourselves bound to
seek for converts from the nations at large,
although we are not at liberty, if we take the Bible
and the practice of the great minds among the
Talmudists, such as Hillel, Rabbi Joshua, and
others, for our guide, to refuse admittance to all
who sincerely desire to seek protection under the
wings of the Lord God of Israel.
But it cannot be subject to the least doubt that the
prophets in their visions foresaw the influence we
should be made to wield, though silently, among the
gentiles. As a proof, we will cite Hosea ii. 1: “And
the number of the children of Israel shall be as the
sand of the sea, which cannot be measured nor
num-<<536>>bered; and it shall come to pass that
instead that they were called, Ye are not my people
(Lo-’ammi), they shall be called, The sons of the
living God.” So also Micah v. 6, 7: “And the remnant
of Jacob shall be in the midst of many people like
dew from the Lord, like showers upon the grass, that
waiteth not for man nor hopeth for the sons of man.
And the remnant of Jacob shall be among the nations,
in the midst of many people, like the lion among the
beasts of the forest, like a young lion among flocks
of sheep, who, if he break in, both treadeth down
and teareth in pieces, whilst none can deliver.”
We
will not argue at length the evident meaning of both
the prophecies we have quoted, spoken as they were
at times when sin and iniquity had fearfully
deteriorated the Israelites both of Samaria and
Jerusalem when the first was nigh her dissolution,
and the other hastening fast in the downward
footsteps of her faithless sister; since it must be
evident that both Hosea and his compeer spoke of a
distant time, when, as the one expresses it, there
should be men on earth who would dispute our claim
of being God’s people; and when, as the other
alleges, we should be but a remnant of Jacob, when
the majority, the main body of Jacob’s descendants,
shall have been swept from the earth by the long
course of sufferings to which they shall have been
subjected. And still of both cases it is said that a
time will come when we shall be called the sons
of the living God, not the followers of a dying
Christ, not the adherent of a being who lived with
the breath in his nostrils but who returned on the
day of his dissolution to his native earth, but the
worshippers of the Omnipotent, Everlasting One, who
never dies, never undergoes change or corruption.
Again, we shall be like the dew that waiteth not for
man, like the refreshing showers which ask for
nothing from children of mortality; farther we shall
be independent in our dispersion, like the solitary
lion amidst the beasts of the forest, neither
fearing them nor being dismayed at their cry and
roaring, like the dauntless young of the king of the
field, who tramples under foot the resistless flocks
that flee at his presence.
The prophet evidently did not mean that we should be
like the lion to destroy or to injure; for this idea
is a mere exposition of <<537>>being, like the dew
and rain; and he thus endeavoured to convey that as
little as the gift which distils from the sky to
fructify the earth asks the aid of man, as little as
the lion that roams at will requests his food from
mortals: so little shall Israelites, even in
captivity, depend for support, for instruction, for
light, upon those among whom they live. But they
shall, on the contrary, bless by their presence
those who have used them despitefully, who have
endeavoured to tread them under foot, with none to
help.
The prophet, in foreseeing and predicting our
expulsion from Palestine, and our dispersion over
all the earth, knew as well as we do at the present
day, what a sorrowful fate would be ours; he could
clearly see that but few of many would be able to
escape; that in every generation our adversaries
would league together to extinguish the lamp of
Israel. Nay the Rabbins at the latter portion of the
time that the temple stood, entertained this view,
as may be inferred from the words which they left as
a maxim, “That in all ages men rise up against us to
destroy us, but that it is the Lord who saves us
from their hand;” thus showing that the world’s
hostility to us has always been well known and
perfectly understood by our spiritual guides. The
independence, therefore, to which Micah refers, must
be the spiritual opposition which we offer to the
world; the singularity of our upholding our ancient
faith in the presence of a hostile array which would
terrify any other class of men except those who like
us are taught of the Lord; and then as Hosea adds,
when the opposition to the truth has been kept up to
the last moment it is possible of being maintained,
conviction will fill the minds of mankind, and all
will acknowledge that we are the children of the
living God,—meaning that our ideas of the Deity,
our perseverance in observing the commands we have
received as the emblem of our mission, our refusal
to become fused with other sons of man, were all
well founded in truth, and that our so acting was
actually in obedience to the instruction of the
Almighty, who is emphatically and alone the One God
who is living and existing for ever.
We
do not believe there are many Israelites who would
dispute this position, and they are nearly all
willing to maintain <<538>>the permanence of the
monotheistic idea among us, and that at length it
will become universally adopted through our means
though they are not agreed about the method by which
this change is to be effected. We do not know that
we express the, idea correctly but we think that we
do our reform friends no injustice by stating it
thus: They imagine that history shows a gradual
tendency towards the sublimer conception of the
Godhead, which we received as a free gift for the
education of mankind at Sinai.
The laws and
ceremonies which were connected with the simplicity
of our faith may have been indeed necessary in the
first instance, to preserve us distinct, and by that
means keep alive our belief in one God; but as soon
as the whole world shall have adopted our opinions,
the ceremonies will have become useless, and
therefore of themselves inoperative; and that in the
mean time the more nearly other nations approach to
our standard, the more may we safely relax our
separate and isolated position; which becomes more
and more useless in the progress of man towards
truth. Moreover, that it will require no
personality, no individual, through whom the hope of
man will be realized—in other words, the actual
kingdom of the Messiah, under whom we, the orthodox,
or rather ancient Jews, believe that the Israelites
are to be brought back to their land, the temple
ceremonies to be restored, and the whole world
instructed in the truthful doctrines of which we are
the guardians.
But if these views be indeed those entertained by a
portion of reforming Jews, we must dissent from them
as anti-scriptural and unreasonable. Granted that
they are right, for argument’s sake, one of two
timings would necessarily be the case: either the
law was necessary at the first, founded upon weighty
reasons of a permanent character, or it was not. The
legislation having been divine,—and if this be
denied, we cease at once to be Jews,—we must assume
that all the precepts which we have received were
not alone true and wise, but necessary also, since
we cannot imagine that God would impart to us
precepts merely to gratify an arbitrary humour for
governing. Now even concede that the legislation had
by any possibility been intended to be merely
temporary there must be a clause somewhere to state
this in <<539>>plain terms.
There are indeed occasional laws and special
enactments which refer to particular persons, and
especial localities,—which of course are inoperative
upon other persons and under other circumstances;
but there is no reason whatever to draw conclusions
from these upon the whole Mosaic moral and
ceremonial code; it is one thing to say that the law
relative to royalty is abolished, or rather dormant,
whilst we have no king; and quite another to assert
that for this same reason circumcision and Sabbath
may be modified to suit the progressive spirit of
the age. It is true that with but a few small
exceptions all laws referring to the priesthood in
Aaron’s family are placed in abeyance; but this does
not authorize us to intermarry with gentiles, or
with those whom the law interdicts as near of kin;
because the cases are not parallel. We say,
therefore, that, so far as the law itself is the
exponent of its own nature, so far as we can judge
from itself relative to its permanence in every
respect, it is as evident as that a sun shines by
day, that, let the world believe in one God or
worship stocks and stones; let the Islam or
Christianity prevail; whether Confucius, the great
Lama, or Bhudda be adored,—we have not received any
authority to diverge from the course which has been
marked out for us by our prophet Moses, who is, as
we have often maintained, the sole guide for all the
prophets and subsequent composers of biblical books,
and for our own time and for all other times to
come, unless a new revelation should be given, in
which we should be absolved from all allegiance to
our ancient rule of life. Consequently, we wait for
the arguments to sustain the assumption of the
reformers that the Mosaic system expects its tacit
abrogation.
Besides, we doubt, and this most seriously, whether
the world will progress towards a knowledge of the
truth without some previous terrible convulsion (חבלי
של משיח), through which means the systems of
error shall be shaken everywhere, it is idle to
assume that our Rabbins, especially the Talmudists,
were so foolish as some of the moderns would make us
believe; they were close observers of nature and
history, so far as both were accessible to them in
their generations. They saw or had heard of the rise
of the Alexandrian philosophy, the rise and progress
of Christianity, the revival of the Parsee system of
fire-worship, <<540>>which moderns would persuade us
was but another phase of our own belief in one God;
and they had also beheld with evident satisfaction
the gradual extinction of Roman, Grecian, and
Egyptian mythological superstitions; and still they
believed that something far more potent and weighty
than this gradual necessarily slow progress was
demanded to accomplish the predictions of the
prophets. We are well aware that the words of the
Rabbis, “On the day Jerusalem was destroyed the
Messiah was born,” are interpreted, that the belief
in this personage took its rise only in the downfall
of our state, and with the destruction of our
temple; but this is evidently a wrong exposition of
the Messianic belief which we entertain. On the
contrary, it seems to us, if we strip the words of
their evident miraculous meaning, that they convey
the unwavering trust which our sages felt in the
midst of all their calamities. They saw the temple
burned, the walls of their glorious city battered
down by the Roman artillery; they beheld millions of
valiant defenders sink upon the grave of their
country and their glory: still they were not
dismayed, for they foresaw the coming of the Son of
David, as though he was born at that very day when
the smoke of the burning temple and city darkened
with its lurid glare, the pure atmosphere, that it
spread over the hill of Moriah and the beautiful
Zion; they gloried in the certainty, that with their
temple their religion should not perish; that though
nearly exterminated beneath the smouldering ruins of
their beloved capital, the people would not perish
utterly, but live and flourish; after all of Rome
and Hellas should have sunk into decay; when Babel
should be a heap of ruins, the dwelling of serpents;
and Egypt be swallowed up as it is now, by the armed
bands of ruthless conquerors.
Tell us not that the sages of Israel, who so well
knew how to resist the tyranny of domestic and
foreign foe, who so well understood to animate the
sinking spirit of their hearers, to stimulate the
faltering courage of their countrymen, were nothing
but ignorant and silly fanatics, who uttered
fabulous and unmeaning sayings, or endeavoured to
fasten a foolish belief on the people; no, they
uttered in their sententious manner the accumulated
wisdom of ages, and they showed, in their
<<541>>practical good sense, that they understood
history and progress as well, to say the least, as
the best of their modern detractors.
We
must break off here abruptly, to our regret, and
resume the subject in our next number.
(To be continued.) |
