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Page 10 The Southern Israelite Food Prices Today And A Year Ago What consumers save over last year’s cost A&P is advertising prices of food today compared with prices a year ago. The dif ferences in the lists generally show substantial reductions. The idea is to bring home to the housewife how much less her food is costing her than it cost last year at this time. In these figures she sees actual facts, not theories. To her they have a high practical news value. They are important in an other way. They illustrate in dollars and cents AftP's policy —the policy of passing on to the consumer the savings that come from lower food prices. By A&P’s new low prices customers can measure the de cline in the cost of the raw materials that enter into what they eat. GREAT ATLANTIC & PACIFIC T & The Jewish Conscious, By SAMUEL HIRSHBERG Rabbi of Temple Emanu-El-B’ne Jeshurun, Milwaukee Wl Much has been written in the present discussion with respect to a Jewish con sciousness. Just what is to be under stood by this term? There is a sense in which birth does put its ineradicable impress upon us as members of the particular family of man to which we belong, and I would not gainsay my Zionist brethren herein. There is a sense—it is not to be denied—in which we are born distinctively Jews, just as there is a sense in which other folk are born distinctively Christian. There is a definite Christian conscious ness, and there is a definite Jewish con sciousness. But, let it be remarked, I do not mean anything here of racial and, least of all, of a nationalistic conscious ness. Just as there is a Christian con sciousness that cuts across and transcends all divisions of race and nationality, as is it with this that we term the Jewish consciousness. A certain common history, extending through a long period of generations and ages, a certain community in thoup' beliefs, ideas, purposes, traditions, experi ences, observances, practices, has gener ated and developed a certain attitude of mind, a certain point of view, a certain state of feeling and emotion—an entire definite psychology and philosophy of life which we recognize, on the one hand, as peculiarly Christian; and he then who is of Christian parentage, inevitably and in escapably inherits this Christian psychol ogy with its especial mode of outlook upon and reaction towards life. And similarly, the like common history, the like community in beliefs, traditons, ex periences and observances, extended through an even much longer period of generations and ages, has begotten and de veloped, on the other hand, a distinctive Jewish psychology and philosophy of life, and he then who is of Jewish parentage inevitably and inescapably inherits this. There may be liberal Christians—Uni tarians, for instance—who in their the ology are much more akin to Jews than they are to their fellow Christians, just as there are Jews who theologically are much nearer akin to members of other liberal faiths than they are to their Or thodox brethren, yet when it comes to the basic elements of the inner beings of both, the one thinks and feels himself essentially, fundamentally and inextri cably Christian, undetachably part and parcel of the great solidarity of Christian fellowship, and the other feels himself equally as essentially, fundamentally and inextricably Jewish, undetachibly still part and parcel of the great solidarity of Jewish fellowship. The ancestral history and heritage of each have so informed and colored their inner nature, the thought and emotional life of each, as to imbue and infuse each with an inseparable consciousness of his own. But though this be so, though like ante cedents and heritages have had their part and no small part at that in determining such a consciousness of ourselv . as j still is there one factor whiG, rcnia l ever of first and most essent Rabbi Samuel Hirshberg here. Fundamental and in lispcnsahle t the whole of this consciousness at>u which I have been remarking, withou which it would be but as suspended in tl insubstantial air, is the underlying reli gious consciousness, the sense of certain common ideas of God and the humai relationship to Him, certain coninv ideas of man, his intrinsic worth, h duties and relations to his fellows, whic in the last analysis form the sole distb tive reason for the being of the Jews. It has been his religion which has 1 the great sustaining force for the Jew the force which has kept him alive a given him the one all-sufficing justifi« give him such justification and purpoM for persistence in the future, for, with out a distinctive religion of his c without a definite culture of his own solely in the realm of the moral and lh< spiritual, especially to mark him as it h 35 ever in all previous time, I can see sound reason for the Jew to continue the times ahead. Divested of his religi° n the spiritual and ethical ideas and id for which Judaism has stood historically and distinctively ever before the wor the sooner the Jew would abnegate < other particularistic identity he mig 1 have and merge and lose himself, > ea - “assimilate” himself utterly—for the tenT has no terrors for me—with ' - ality of folk about him, ' There is no good warrant, no rhymed- reason in the Jew being presen religion abandoned. The Jew, n religion, is but a sorry anac ™ sin ' spectral survival before the The Jew is Jew then pre-em 11 t £• -> virtruc pre-essentially, before all else, . of his religion. Without this, L e ^ j any definiteness of consci might want to preserve, is as