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A
Sermon For Sabbath Hanukkah.*
O
Thou, Almighty Father, who art the sole God in
heaven and on earth; we call on Thee to bless our
assembling before thy sanctuary, to offer our
prayers and thanksgiving at this season of
rejoicing, because of the mercies thou didst show
towards thy people, when the mighty rose up against
them. New opinions had taken deep root among Israel;
the stranger was strong in the many adherents his
philosophy had among those belonging to our
household; and it only needed the arm of power, as
man might have fancied, to entirely uproot the
worship of Thee from our land. But Thou, Father,
didst not look on heedless of the strife of mortals;
and, Thou strengthenest the arm of Matthityah and
his sons; and they rose in the might of heroes, and
overthrew the oppressors, expelled the stranger
armies from our soil, and restored the service into
thy profaned sanctuary. And thus it was thy will to
sustain the knowledge of thy religion; and from the
bottom of distress sprang up those who were true and
faithful, and who transmitted the truth, which they
had preserved, to us their latest descendants. O
grant then Almighty God! that the recurrence of the
memorial of the reconsecration of thy house may have
an abiding effect on us; and that when we light the
outward lamp of commemoration, we may be enabled to
resolve to kindle within us the fire of devotion and
obedience, and that we may thus be animated with the
will and the spirit of the Asmoneans of old, to
defend thy law at all hazards, and to sustain thy
religion though all the world were leagued against
us. And be it also thy will that success may attend
our exertions, and that we may see the fruits of our
labours in thy cause, in the conversions of sinners
and the confirmation of the righteous. So shall our
spirit praise Thee, and the glory of thy greatness
shall fill our mouth, and the nations shall hear of
thy name, and worship Thee in truth as do thy people
Israel. Amen.
<<277>>
BRETHREN :
The prophet Zachariah says in ii. 14,
רני ושמחי בת ציון כי הנני
בא ושכנתי בתכך נאם ה׳׃ זכרי׳ ב׳ י״ד
To
one who has even but some superficial knowledge of
Scripture, there must be something curious in the
attitude which the world at large occupies towards
the Jews. The Bible apparently says one thing, and
the world another; the Scripture speaks of Israel,
the world insists that some other persons are meant
and still we stand in the same position we always
stood, and it would be curious indeed, if the error
should be on our part, and that we must, therefore,
have been all along groping our way in doubt and
darkness. One of two things must be admitted, either
we are right now, or were always wrong or, it must
be exhibited by undoubted proof, that we have at
some time, since the Bible was delivered into our
safe-keeping, changed our position, that is to say,
that we commenced a different course of life from
what we were accustomed to before. The question then
resolves itself into these simple propositions: Of
whom does the Bible speak, when using the terms
Zion, daughter of Zion, Jacob, Israel, and the like?
and if it be the literal descendants of Jacob, have
these then so far changed their life as not to be
any longer in the same attitude towards God, which
they occupied in the time of the prophets?
Now as regards the first question, it is to be
presumed that the prophets must have had an
intelligible meaning in the hearing of those to whom
they were sent, to as great an extent at least, if
not a greater, than they have to us at the present
day. Look, therefore, into their works, as we may
freely call the writings or records of prophecy
which have come down to us, and you will see that
they are uniformly addressed to their own
fellow-countrymen, when they call them by name, or
by some metaphorical expression which as clearly
defined them. Whenever they wanted to speak to and
of other nations, whenever they referred to other
countries than Palestine, they did not
<<278>>lack
words to give a clear expression of theirs ideas,
and we may be assured that, if any obscurity does
occasionally exist in the prophetic writings, it is
owing to our own want of knowledge of the attendant
circumstances under which they were composed, and
not to any defect in information on the part of the
sacred writers themselves.
There is so much sublimity, such force, such
elegance, such precision in their denunciations and
promises, that no one, with any degree of common
sense, can for a moment have any doubt of their
general tendency; and only the expressions of an
unknown signification can at all be relied upon as
an excuse for an occasional misapprehension. But, to
say that Israel is not Israel, that Zion means Rome,
or Athens, or anything else than the veritable city
of David; that the daughter of Zion or Jerusalem
means the church, whatever that may be; that
Jerusalem means an association of some sort, founded
upon another scheme than the upholding of the unity
of God, is to argue as though words had no definite
meaning, and were intended to conceal, not to
express thoughts. And even, granted for a moment,
that the sacred messengers when addressing Israel
meant ritually some other nation, the question would
naturally arise as to the new identity. We will
state the proposition: Israel is not the natural
Israel, Zion is not the city of David, the one well
known in history, the other in the geography of the
world.
Where are we now to look for them? are we to go to
Arabia to hunt for the former, amidst the
half-savage tribes that roam over the desert? are we
to go to Mekka to find our new Zion? Unquestionably,
the followers of Mahomed might put in a claim for
these distinctions, for all we can know of the
matter; and hence, the Arabs may be the new Israel
and their holy city the new Jerusalem. But this will
not satisfy our Nazarene neighbours; they claim to
be an Israel more spiritual than the Jews, more
elect than the followers of Mahomed, and hence, they
assert that all the blessings are centred in them;
that all the good the prophets speak of is, or will
be, fulfilled in them and through them; and though
some will not exclude the literal descendants of
Jacob altogether, they do it with so many
qualifications as utterly to render any good to be
expected for <<279>>the Jews, as such totally
valueless for them in a national point of view.
Perhaps, no words have ever been so much tortured as
Zion and Jerusalem. The Jews find them in Palestine,
a little east from the Mediterranean Sea, not far
from where the Jordan rolls its sacred waves into
the bosom of the Sea of Salt, which marks the
ancient site of the sinful cities of Sodom and its
consorts; but to the Nazarene, however he may
cherish the soil on which the alleged founder of his
religion is said to have walked; however he may
erect churches, chapels, convents, and monuments on
each particular spot which he conceives hallowed by
events, which he supposes to have taken place in
ages gone by, and which he fancies shed a glory and
a brilliancy on his faith—I say, to the Nazarene,
they convey a signification very different; he has a
mode of interpreting entirely his own, he has a
literal and a spiritual sense of words, and if the
first suit him, you must not expect that he will
forego any advantage resulting therefrom; but if
this be against his opinion as taught by his
priests, or as he has elaborated it himself, he will
adopt a spiritual rendering of evident words, and so
transform them that no one could possibly recognise
them under their new guise, though he have written
them himself.
What this spiritual rendering may be, depends
altogether upon the circumstances of the case; it
may be one thing, or it may be the other. For
instance, the dry bones of Ezekiel are, as the
prophet actually says, the house of Israel; so far
the spiritualizers will go with us; but how many
singular applications have not been made of this
vision or actual occurrence in which Ezekiel, by the
command of God, revived so many slain ones of the
house of Israel. If you read to the end of the
section you will find glorious promises to the
descendants of Jacob, the assurance of a
resurrection, a restoration to the land of Israel,
and the prediction of life. But before the
spiritualist reaches thus far, he has already
exhausted his ingenuity on the vision of the dry
bones; he fancies, therefore, that he has done
enough in imagining the fleshless remains of
humanity prefigurate the spiritual wants of our
people at the present day; and the breath which was
to return into the bodies of the slain, he imagines
to be his pretended new revelation which
<<290>>was
already then foreshadowed should supplant the old
system in our possession.
But I pray you read the first fourteen verses of the
37th of Ezekiel, with a simple intention of being
taught what the words of the Bible teach, and you
will not find a word of a new law, a modern
revelation, or a new spirituality. The Lord is
spoken of as putting a spirit into the dead, so that
they shall live. He says that He will open the
graves of his people,—mind the prophet speaks of the
bones being emblematic of, or actually the whole
house of Israel, and that they shall live and be
brought back to live in peace in their own land.
Where do you discover here any allusion to a new
law? to a revelation not then known? to a spirit
which was to be foreign to our religion? Or you may
say the new law is to be identical with the old, a
perfection of its original principles; but Ezekiel
speaks of no such change or addition as impending
over the religion which he then professed, and
surely no one will say that the modern system of the
Nazarenes is identical in any shape with the conduct
of Israelites under the ancient law.
This spiritualizing has not even the advantage of
the word new being introduced into the
prophecy, so as to read “and I will put my new
spirit in you, and you shall live,” for it simply
says “my spirit;” wherefore, unless you are aided by
some instruction derived from a source other than
the Bible, you cannot discover in the whole passage
an allusion to the alleged repeal of the Jewish Law.
We know of but one spirit of life, that is the will
of God, here sent to revive the dead, as elsewhere
it is given as the law which He put in our mouth,
not to depart thence to all eternity (Isa. lix. 21).
Where, then, we ask, is the warrant for the curious
and constant misapplication of Ezekiel’s vision of
the dry bones? of the shaking which the gentiles
aver is perceived among them whenever an effort is
made or to be made to convert them from their
religion?
It
is surprising, that men of sense can endeavour so
far, indeed to impose on others equally sensible,
with such silly misapplication of the holy word of
God; but so it is; and much as we may regret this
want of candour in those who pretend to read the
Bible for instruction solely, we cannot say that
this system of error does not exist.
<<281>>
Having thus given you a specimen of half literal and
half spiritual exposition, let us revert back to the
words Zion and Jerusalem. They, of course, mean the
literal city when it is said that Zion shall be
desolate, when it is predicted that Jerusalem shall
be overthrown; but when mention is made of future
greatness, of glory, of the divine presence to be
again restored to the new-built temple, which is
never to be defiled any more by the uncircumcised
and the unclean: O, then the system is changed, then
Zion means the church, Jerusalem the community of
saints, and what else not? all, in short, except
what the Bible evidently means. This, however, is
the natural consequence of departing from the Law of
God. If the gentiles, in forsaking their idols, had
candidly said that they adopted those parts of the
Bible which were obligatory on them, according to
the well-established principle of Judaism, that they
would honestly conform to the precepts of the
children of Noah, but that to the Israelites proper,
their mission was as necessary as ever that they
were still bound by all the precepts of the law, and
to them the prophetic future was indeed full of
glory and greatness: all would have been well, the
Jews would have readily admitted the converts to the
new moral system into their fellowship as proselytes
so far as they went, without taking them into the
full community of the Synagogue, because this
privilege is only for those who join themselves
literally and fully to the congregation of Jacob.
But under such a system, Jews and gentiles could
have lived happily together; the former, observing
the whole of their duties, undismayed by fear or
oppression, in the hope that a time would come when
the power of the Lord would be made manifest to all
creatures, when all men would receive an especial
direction how to obey the will of God in the new
state of things which is then to prevail. But the
gentiles, in their new zeal, could not be so
tolerant; they wanted to establish their adherence
to God on a new basis, on one essentially differing
from the standard of Israel; and hence, in taking
the Scriptures as their guide, they had from
necessity to abolish the literal sense of the words,
because this indicted their views and contradicted
their opinions at every turn. I could easily enlarge
on the subject, <<282>>and detain you for hours with
references and proofs of what I say; but enough has
been shown already to exhibit to you the manner of
conducting the argument in the gentile way, and its
entire unsoundness.
Whatever fancied reasons the opponents of Judaism
may have to carry a spiritual, or rather an
allegorical sense into the plain views of the Bible,
it will not be satisfactory to any one who, either
for the first time is made acquainted with the words
of Scripture as a child who has just learned to
read, or a convert from a strange country who has
not been biased by either Jew or Nazarene, or to
him who has learned to base Judaism upon what the
word teaches in its plain signification. So far do
the Jewish authorities respect the simple expression
of our sacred books, that notwithstanding the
well-known propensities to allegorize, not rare
among the Rabbis, all have laid it down as a maxim אין מקרא יוצא מידי פשוטו
“No verse goes out of its evident meaning;” which
establishes clearly the principle, that however you
may be emboldened to seek for hidden allusions in
the word of God, however you may believe, and
believe correctly, “One thing God hath spoken, two
of these have I heard;” however you may be convinced
that a deeper sense lie hidden under the outside of
ordinary expressions, that the simple narratives
point to higher and more mysterious thoughts:
notwithstanding all this, the words employed mean in
themselves only what they ostensibly mean, neither
more nor less than what common sense would
understand by them.
I
know that I may be met by the question as to what
becomes then of the traditional expositions which we
have received? But, indeed they are all based upon
the words of the Bible as they were understood at
the time they were written. Reflect well that the
original text of Scripture is not any longer the
vernacular of any country; ages have passed since it
has been merely a sacred dialect of our people.
Consequently the very meaning of words depends upon
traditional evidence; wherefore we must submit to be
instructed from father to son as to what Israelites
always believed they were commanded to do. I speak
not now of the few rabbinical ordinances which are
not founded on the Bible at all, as they are mere
regulations <<283>>made in the spirit of the
Scriptures, and are not to be looked for in the
words themselves; for instance, the lighting of the Hanuccah lamps, the reading of the prayers three
times a day, and the like; for, although binding on
all Israelites, they are not held up as absolute
commands given us by Moses.—But, as regards the
process of wresting Scripture from its original
sense, to make the words, after their plain sense
has been developed, the vehicle for spiritual,
hidden, mysterious, and, therefore, false deductions
(for false they are, so soon as they clash with and
contradict the evident dogmas of the Bible), it is
evident that it can never claim to be authoritative
with any one whose earliest infancy has not been
imbued, and, therefore, corrupted by a process so
unreasonable.
For instance, say that Israel is not Israel, and
that Zion is not Zion, it will be next to impossible
to assign them any tangible and satisfactory
meaning. I may contend, in the potency of my
intellect, that Israel is put for Russia; another
may claim it with equal right to be Japan or the
distant isles of the sea. I may say Zion meant Rome;
another will have the same right to find in Stamboul
or London the mystical prototype of the ancient city
of David. One may transform Jerusalem into the
church, that is his own peculiar form or mode of
worship and belief; but, another may, with equal
right, place his church on that pedestal, and so
claim it and himself to be the sole heirs of all the
good that is predicted for restored Jerusalem.
It
would be a curious chapter in theological
controversy to hunt up all the mad exhibitions which
such an unfounded system of interpretation has
caused; one and the same place is called the modern
Zion and Babylon by different sects; and for all
Israelites can know or care, both assumptions are
equally correct, for Rome is neither Zion nor
Babylon, no matter how great her alleged virtues and
how great her actual crimes. I only give you this
specimen to put you on your guard against being
confounded by the bold assurances occasionally put
forth that so and so the Bible teaches; allegory is
the weapon of our opponents, spiritualizing is the
sword with which they mean to slay Judaism; but
admit nothing in argument which is not clearly
deducible from the word of God, and hesitate not to
reject as <<284>>unsound any and every opinion which
is based upon no better authority than a mystical
interpretation of words which you cannot yourselves
discover in them.
We
come now back to the proposition with which we
started and I think I have given reasons enough to
make it clear, that the terms which were adduced
signify literal Israel, and the literal habitations
of our forefathers, when the terms meaning these
ideas are employed. Now, as regards the other
question, whether we occupy the same attitude
towards God as at the time of the prophets, but few
words remain to be said. We cannot deny that much
and often have we been guilty of transactions which
the law and the prophets condemn; or else Jerusalem
would not have been destroyed a second time, nor
would we have been again rendered fugitives from our
land, and strangers in nearly all the countries of
the earth. But let us ask, how could we have
improved our condition by changing wholly our faith?
could we have become true to God, if, instead of
being guilty riot alone of the sins which destroyed
our temple, we had also, assumed a trinity for our
god, abolished circumcision, changed the seventh day
Sabbath for the first day of the week, and neglected
totally the festivals of the Lord; ate forbidden
food as things permitted by authority of religion,
and mingled freely in marriage with the nations of
the earth? Say would these things have shown our
adherence to God our reconversion to the worship of
the Most High?
It
is almost insulting to common sense to make such
inquiries, their absurdity is too glaring to deserve
even a serious refutation. But it is precisely on
such grounds that the Nazarenes claim to occupy our
ancient position; they claim to be the spiritual
Israel, and have offended as such against the
revealed word in the manner just indicated. What are
to us their spirituality, their assumed holiness,
their high claims to grace? have they not in their
practices contradicted the Scriptures in every
particular? And then, let us ask, which is true, the
letter of the word or the assumed spirit? both
cannot be true, this is certain, and it is for the
word of God, as it reads, to decide between us and
them.
But, brethren, it has decided; there is no
difficulty about ascertaining its meaning,
<<285>>which is the true spirit that breathes
through it, and this says, “In all the way which the
Lord your God hath commanded you shall you walk, you
shall not turn therefore to the right or to the
left.”
I
say, let this decide; and till the abolition of the
Sabbath, circumcision, prohibitions, the festivals
and other ordinances can be proved not to be a
departure to the right or to the left, we cannot
give our assent to a system which claims such
sacrifices at our hands, not to mention that it
demands before anything else the surrender of our
faith in the blessed unity, and to adopt in its
place an association which the Bible emphatically
prohibits and declares that it does not exist; for
it teaches “that the Lord is the only God in heaven,
and on earth there is none else.”
Hear ye! there is no one else, the words are
אין עוד
Ane ‘Od “there is none else,” simple,
brief, comprehensive, excluding, therefore, any and
every imaginable idea of pother deity, independent
of or associated with the sole and Almighty Creator,
to whom be praise to everlasting. Though, therefore,
we have sinned, though so many of us are entirely
neglectful of God’s teaching, we have not as a
nation apostatized; we stand, therefore, on the same
platform on which we were placed at our going out of
Egypt; consequently, all the promises of the
prophets, all the mercies predicted by command of
God as reserved for Israel and Zion, must be
expected to be fulfilled in us and our holy city;
the former of which shall be restored whenever the
time comes, and the latter of which shall be built
up as an everlasting structure never more to be
destroyed.
Yea, God will come and dwell in the tabernacle of
the daughter of Zion, whilst many nations will come
to join themselves unto the Lord and be his people
also; but not in detriment, but in addition to the
sons of Israel who have remained faithful and
trusted in God that He would be true to his promise,
and give them glory instead of ashes, and a joyful
spirit instead of a grieved heart. May this be
speedily fulfilled to our joy and the happiness of
all the earth. Amen.
Kislev 29, Dec. 14, 5610. |
