Students of jurisprudence
know (and who knows so well as the Jew?) that
the laws and statutes of every nation are
not all observed and obeyed at all times in
the same degree; that in all countries and
in all ages there are certain laws, be they
new or old, which are perfectly valid according
to the statue book, and are yet disregarded
by those who administer justice, and are wholly
or largely ineffective in practice.
If one examines a law of
this kind, one will always find that its spirit
is opposed to the spirit that prevails at
the time in the moral and political life of
society. If it is a new law, it will be found
to have come into existence before its time,
to have been the work of lawgivers whose spiritual
development was in advance of that of the
general body of society. If it is an old law,
we shall find that its day is past, that society
in its spiritual development has left behind
it the spirit of those old lawgivers. In either
case, this particular law, being out of harmony
with the spirit that governs the progress
of life in that particular age, may be valued
and honored like all the other laws, but has
no power to make itself felt in practice.
And yet reformers act quite
rightly when they anticipate the course of
events, and put laws on the statue book before
the time has come when they can be practically
effective; and conservatives also act rightly
when they secure the survival in the statute
books of laws whose time has gone by. Both
parties know that they are doing good service,
each for its own cause. They both understand
that the spirit of society moves in a circle,
now forwards, now backwards, and that in this
circular movement it may arrive, sooner or
later, at the stage of development that these
laws represent. When that time comes, it will
be a matter of importance whether the laws
are there in readiness or not. If they are,
the spirit of society will quickly enter into
them, as a soul enters into a body, and will
inform them with life, and make them active
forces, while they will be for the spirit
a definite, material form, through which its
preeminence will be secured. But if there
is not this material form waiting for the
spirit to enter into it; if the spirit is
compelled to wander bodiless until it can
create for itself a new corporeal vesture,
then there is danger that, before the spirit
can gain a firm footing where it desires to
stay, the wheel may turn again, and the favorable
moment be lost.
This is true not only of
written laws and statues, but also of the
unwritten ideas and judgments of the human
mind. In every age you will find certain isolated
beliefs and opinions, out of all relation
to the ruling principles on which the life
of that age is built. They lie hidden in a
water-tight compartment of the mind, and have
no effect whatever on the course of practical
life. Ideas such as these are mostly survivals,
inherited from earlier generations. In their
own time they were founded on current conceptions
and actual needs of life; but gradually the
spirit of society has changed: the foundations
on which these ideas rested have been removed,
and the ideas stand by a miracle. Their appearance
of life is illusory: it is no real life of
motion and activity, but the passive life
of an old man whose "moisture is gone,
and his natural force abated." Anthropologists
(such as Tylor and many after him) have found
aged creatures of this description in every
branch of life; and they live sometimes to
a remarkable age.
So much for the survivals.
But there are here also anticipations, children
who have not reached their full strength--ideas
born in the minds of a few men of finer mould,
who stand above their generation, and whom
favoring circumstances have enabled to disseminate
their ideas, and to win acceptance for them,
before their time: that is, before the age
is fully able to understand and assimilate
them. These ideas, being only learned parrot-wise,
and being out of harmony with the prevailing
spirit, are left, like the survivals, outside
the sphere of active forces. Their life is
that of the babe and the suckling. Grown men
fondle them, take pleasure in their childish
prattle, sometimes play with them; but never
ask their advice on a practical question.
And yet, so long as the breath
of life remains in them, there is hope both
for the anticipations and for the survivals:
for the one in the forward march of the spirit,
for the other in its backward trend. And so
here also we must say that philosophers have
done well to work for the dissemination of
their new opinions, or the strengthening of
the old opinions to which they have been attached,
without caring whether the age was fit to
receive them, whether it received them for
their own sake or for the sake of something
else, whether it could find in them a mode
of life and a guide in practice. These philosophers
know that a live weakling is better than a
dead Hercules; that so long as an idea lives
in the human mind, be it but in a strange
and distorted form, be its life but a passive
life confined to some dim, narrow chamber
of the mind-- so long it may hope in the fulness
of time to find its true embodiment; so long
it may hope, when the right day dawns, to
fill the souls of men, to become the living
spirit that informs all thoughts and all actions.
For an instance of an anticipation,
take the idea of the Unity of God among the
Jews in the period of the Judges and the Kings,
until the Babylonian Exile.
Hume and his followers have
proved conclusively that what first aroused
man to a recognition of his Creator was not
his wonder at the beauty of nature and her
marvels, but his dread of the untoward accidents
of life. Primitive man, wandering about the
earth in search of food, without shelter from
the rain or protection against the cold, persecuted
unsparingly by the tricks of nature and by
wild beasts, was not in a position to take
note of the laws of creation, to gaze awe-struck
at the beauty of the world, and to ponder
the question "whether such a world could
be without a guide." [Midrash, Lek Leka,
39]. All his impulses, feelings and thoughts
were concentrated on a single desire, the
desire for life; in the light of that desire
he saw but two things in all nature--good
and evil: that which helped and that which
hindered in his struggle for existence. as
for the good, he strove to extract from it
all possible benefit, without much preliminary
thought about its source. But evil was more
common and more readily perceptible than good:
and how escape from evil? This question gave
his mind no rest; it was this question that
first awoke in him, almost unconsciously,
the great idea that every natural phenomenon
has a lord, who can be appeased by words and
won over by gifts to hold evil in check. Yes,
and also--the idea developed of itself--to
bestow good. Thus all the common phenomena
of nature became gods, in more or less close
contact with hum an life and happiness; the
earth became as full of deities as nature
of good things and evil.
But it was not only from
nature and her blind forces that primitive
man had to suffer. The hand of his fellow-man
too was against him. In those days there were
no states or kingdoms, no fixed rules of life
or ordinances of justice. The human race was
divided into families, each living its own
life, and each engaged in an endless war of
extinction with its neighbor. The evil cased
by man to man was sometimes even more terrible
than the hostility of nature. And her also
man sought and found help in a divine power;
only in this case he did not turn to the gods
of nature, who were common to himself and
his enemies. Each family looked for help to
its own special god, a god who had no care
in the world but itself, no purpose but to
protect it from its enemies. Thus, when in
course of time these families grew into nations
living a settled life, and the war of man
against man took on a more general form; when
the individual man was able to sit at peace
with his household in the midst of his people,
and the process of merciless destruction was
carried on by nation against nation, not by
family against family: then the family gods
disappeared, or sank to the level of household
spirits; but their place was filled by national
gods, one god for each nation, whose function
it was to watch over it in time of peace,
and to punish its enemies in time of war.
This double polytheism, natural
and national, has its source, therefore, not
in an accidental error of judgment, but in
the real needs of the human soul and the conditions
of human life in primitive ages. Since these
needs and these conditions did not idffer
materially in different countries, it is no
matter for wonder that among all ancient peoples
we find the same faith (though names and external
forms vary): a faith in nature-gods, who help
man in his war with nature, and in national
gods, who help the nation in its war with
other nations. But in some cases the belief
in the nature-gods is more prominent, in others
the belief in the national godsl this is determined
by the character and history of the particular
nation, by its relation to nature and its
status among other peoples.
Hence, when the abstract
idea of the Unity of God arose and spread
among the Israelites in early days, it could
not possibly be anything but an anticipation.
Only a select few had a true and living comprehension
of the idea, compelling the heart fo feel
and the will to follow. The masses, although
they heard the idea preached times without
number by their Prophets, and thought that
they believed in it, had only an external
knowledge of it; and their belief was an isolated
belief, not linked with actual life, adn without
influence in practice. It was in vain that
the Prophets labored to breathe the spirit
of life into this belief. It was so far removed
from the contemporary current of ideas and
feelings, that it could not possibly rood
itself firmly in the heart, or find a spiritual
thread by which to link itself with actual
life.
The author of the Book of
Judges has a way of complaining of the fickleness
of our ancestors in those days. In time of
trouble they always turned to the God of their
forefathers; but when he had saved them from
their enemies, they regularly returned to
the service of toerh gods, "and remembered
not the Lord their God who had delivered them
from all their enemies round about."
But, in fact, our ancestors were not so fickle
as to change their faith like a coat, and
alternate between two opposed religions. They
had always one faith-- the early double polytheism.
Hence, in time of national trouble, of war
and persecution at the hands of other nations,
"the children of Israel cried unto the
Lord their God." It was not that they repented, in the Prophetic sense, and
resolved to live henceforth as believers in
absolute Unity. They turned to the God
of their ancestors, to their own special national God, and prayed Him to fight
their enemies. When the external danger was
over, and the national trouble gave way to
the individual troubles of each man and each
household, they returned to the everyday gods
of nature.
It was only after the destruction
of the Temple, when the spirit of the exiled
people had changed sufficiently to admit of
a belief in the Unity, that the Prophets of
the time found it easy to uproot the popular
faith, and to make the idea of the Unity supreme
throughout the whole range of the people's
life. it was not that the people suddenly
looked upwards and was struck with the force
of the "argument from design;" but
the national disaster had strengthened the
national feeling, and raised it to such a
pitch that individual sorrows vanished before
the national trouble. The people, with all
its thoughts and feelings concentrated on
this one sorrow, was compelled to hold fast
to its one remaining hope: its faith in its
national God and in the greatness of His power
to save His people, not merely in its own
country but also on foreign soil. But this
hope could subsist only on condition that
the victory of the Babylonian king was not
regarded as the victory of the Babylonian
gods. Not they, but the God of Israel, who
was also the God of the world, had given all
countries over to the king of Babylon; and
He who had given would take away. For all
the earth was His: "He created it, and
gave it to whoso seemed right in His eyes."
[Rashi on Gen.i.I]. Thus at length the people
understood and felt the sublime teaching,
which hitherto it had known from afar, with
mere lip-knowledge. The seed which the earlier
Prophets had sown on the barren rock burst
into fruit now that its time had come. When
the Prophet of the Exile cried in the name
of the Lord, "To whom will ye liken Me
and make Me equal?...I am God, and there is
none else," his words were in accord
with the wishes of the people and its national
hope; and so they sank into the heart of the
people., and wiped out every trace of the
earlier outlook and manner of life.
This national hope, as embodied
in the idea of the return to Palestine, affords,
in a much later age, an instance of a "survival."
It is a phenomenon of constant
occurrence, that an object pursued first as
a means comes afterwards to be pursued as
an end. Originally it is sought after not
for its own sake, but because of its connection
with some othe robject of desire; but in course
of time the habit of pursuing and esteeming
the first object, though only for the sake
of the second, creates a feeling of affaction
for the first, which is quite independent
of any ulterior aim; and this affection sometimes
becomes so strong that the ulterior aim, which
was its original justification, is sacrificed
for its sake. Thus it is with the miser. He
begins by loving money for the enjoyment that
its use affords; he ends by forgetting his
original object, and develops an insatiable
thirst for money as such, which will not allow
him even to make use of it for the purposes
of enjoyment.
Similarly, the great religious
idea, which, at the time of its revival, after
the destruction of the first Temple, was meant
to be only a foundation and support for the
national hope, grew and developed in the period
of the second Temple, until it became the
whole content of the nation's spiritual life,
and rose superior even to that national ideal
from which it drew its being. Religion occupied
the first place, and everything else became
secondary; the Jews demanded scarcely anything
except to be allowed to serve God in peace
and quiet. When this was conceded, they were
content to bear a foreign yoke silently and
patiently; when it was not, they fought with
the strength of lions, and knew no rest until
they were again free to devote themselves
uninterruptedly to the service of their Heavenly
Father, whom they loved now not for the sake
of any national reward, but with a whole-hearted
affection, beside which life itself was of
no account.
Thus it came about that,
after the destruction of the second Temple.
what the Jews felt most keenly was not the
ruin of their country and their national life,
but "the destruction of the House [of
God]:" the loss of their religious center,
of the power to serve God in His holy sanctuary,
and to offer sacrifices at their appointed
times. Their loss was spiritual, and the gap
was to be filled by spiritual means. Prayers
stood for sacrifices, the Synagogue for the
Temple. the heavenly Jerusalem for the earthly,
study of the Law for everything. Thus armed,
the Jewish people set out on its long and
arduous journey, on its wanderings "from
nation to nation." It was a long exile
of much study and much prayer, in which the
national hope for the return to Zion was never
forgotten. But this hope was not now, as in
the days of the Babylonian exile, a hope that
materialized in action, and produced a Zerubbabel,
and Ezra, a Nehemiah; it was merely a source
of spiritual consolation, enervating its possessor,
and lulling him into a sleep of sweet dreams.
For now that the religious ideal had conquered
the national, the nation could no longer be
satisfied with little, or be content to see
in the return to Zion merely its own national
salvation. "The land of Israel"
must be "spread over all the lands."
in order "to set the world right by the
kingdom of the Eternal," in order that
"all that have breath in their nostrils
might say, The Lord God of Israel is King."
And so, hoping for more than it could possibly,
achieve, the nation ceased gradually to do
even what it could achieve; and the idea of
the return to Zion, wrapped in a cloud of
phantasies and visions, withdrew from the
world of action, and could no longer be a
direct stimulus to practical effort. Yet,
even so, it never ceased to live and to exert
a spiritual influence; and hence it had sometimes
an effect even on practical life, although
insensibly and indirectly. At first our ancestors
asked in all sincerity and simplicity, "May
not the Messiah come today or tomorrow?"
and ordered their lives accordingly. Afterwards
their courage drooped; their belief in imminent
salvation became weaker and weaker, and no
longer dictated their everyday conduct; but
even then it could occasionally be blown into
flame by some visionary, and become embodied
in a material form, as witness the so-called
"Messianic" movements, in which
the nation strove to attain its hope by practical
methods, which were as spiritual and religious
as the hope itself. But from the day when
the last "Messiah" (Sabbatai Zebi)
came to a bad end, and the spread of education
made it impossible for any dreamer to capture
thousands of followers, the bond between life
and the national hope was broken; the hope
ceased to exert even a spiritual influence
on the people. to be even a source of comfort
in time of trouble, and became an aged, doddering
creature -- a survival.
It had almost become unthinkable
that this outworn hope could renew its youth,
and become again the mainspring of a new movement,
least of all a rational and spontaneous movement.
And yet that is what has happened. The revolutions
of life's wheel have carried the spirit of
our people from point to point on the circle,
until now it begins to approach once more
the healthy and natural condition of two thousand
years ago. This ancient spirit, roused once
more to life, has breathed life into the ancient
ideal, has found in that ideal its fitting
external form, and become to it as soul to
body.
But it is not for us, who
see "the love of Zion" in its new
form, full of life and youthful hope, to treat
with disrespect the aged survival of past
generations. It is not for us to forget what
the new spirit owes to this neglected and
forgotten survival, which our ancestors hid
away in a dim, narrow chamber of their hearts,
to live its death-in-life until the present
day. For, but for this survival, the new spirit
would not have found straightway a suitable
body with which to clothe itself; and then,
perhaps, it might have gone as it came, and
passed away without leaving any abiding trace
in history.