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Reform Judaism and Zionism
By RABBI MOSES P. JACOBSON
(Continued from page 16)
ism has nothing to commend it- Were
everyone of the eight hundred thousand
or nine hundred thousand present inhabi
tants of Palestine a Jew, even then would
Jewish immigration there be restricted to
the possibilities of economic absorption
and the utmost possible Jewish refugeeism
thither would no more relieve the world-
misery of Israel than a bucketful of
water taken out of it would allay the
storms of the ocean. The vision of Pales
tine ever sheltering so much as even but
a single million of Jews is realizable
only by the entire displacement of its
present inhabitants. The country has
reached virtually its saturation point in
population. It is only one-sixth the size
of the State of North Carolina whose
population, despite its situation within the
commercially and industrially most pro
gressive region of the world, and despite
its climatic and scenic attractiveness, the
infinite variety and abundance of its agri
cultural and mineral resources, the posses
sion of an harbor capable of accommodat
ing vessels of the very largest size, the
hospitable and energetic character of its
citizenship, is not quite three and a half
millions. Were Palestine on a par with
North Carolina in these respects it should
have at the most about six hundred
thousand inhabitants. And yet in its utter
poverty it is teeming with over eight
hundred thousand. To throw, then, into
the country a million or even more of
Jews, as the iZonists contend that they
can and at times even proclaim that they
intend, would mean the ultimate eviction
of its entire present Arab population.
What Jew with the most primary sense
of justice can and will blame any home-
loving Palestine Arab for opposing to the
better limit an inescapably implied and
at times even openly heralded outrageous
displacement policy of this character?
Zionism if it persists threatens to in
volve Isreal in a tragedy more dire than
any yet recorded in the entire history of
our diaspora, and it will be a tragedy
which we shall have invited upon our
selves.
Certainly anyone who makes a diag
nosis of this character is apt to be
charged by the iZonists with suggesting
further anti-Jewish riots in Palestine.
But was not Jeremiah of old accused of
abetting the Babylonian denouncement
which he sought to avert? The Zealot
always interprets as an enemy anyone
who gives him sensible warning. Isaiah
lost the cause for God in Israel by ad
dressing the people with the words:
“Come now, and let us reason together,
saith the Lord.”
lo Reform Judaism’s uncompromising
strictures upon its advocacies, Zionism re
plies with a constant sneer at what it
characterizes as Reform Judaism’s seduc
tion of the justification of Israel’s separ
ate existence to the repetitious nunciation
of a few glittering religious generalities
which, according to the Zionists, have long
lost their cogency. “Ethical monotheism
and immortality”—what rallying power,
the Zionists contemptuously ask, is there
in such platitudinous, outlived slogans as
these?
But essential Judaism, which Reform
Judaism represents, is not even as much
as this. Or rather it is infinitely more
than this. The judgment depends upon
the one who is making it. Israel, age
long Israel, in all its varied experience
can never be properly understood unless
it be interpreted simply as an eternal
historiral passioning for and groping to
wards God. Israel, and only Israel, has
impassioned civilization, not with the fear
of God, nor yet even with the love of a
definitely conceived God, but simply with
a hungering consciousness of God,—a
hungering God-consciousness which has
increasingly integrated itself into the
world’s consciousness as the world has in
creasingly apprehended and appreciated
Israel’s distinctive contribution to the
spiritual store of civilization. Essential
Judaism, that is, Reform Judaism, is sim
ply the expression of this God-conscious
ness in its unalloyed, undogmatized
purity, and, with that expression, the con
comitant compulsion of the practice of
the presence of God. To keep the con
sciousness pure and the practice unabating
requires incessant insistence, elucidation
and evidence. One may as well complain
of repetitional breathing as complain of
Reform Judaism’s repetitional expression
of this God-consciousness, and the repe
titional devotional practice of it. Breath
ing is to the prime condition of living
and Reform Judaism is the prime condi
tion today of Israel’s health, strength and
promise.
Judaism definitely burst its nationalistic
chrysalis with the Temple’s destruction in
the year 70 A.C.E. In that very moment
it became conscious of its universalistic
destiny. Rab Judah bar Ezekiel, the fore
most religious authority of his day in
Babylonia, the founder and president of
the great rabbinical academy in Pumba-
detha, as early as the year 250 A.C.E.,
declared Zionism to be a religious crime.
But already a hundred and eighty years
before that, Rabbi Eliezer ben Tyrkanos,
for himself and all his colleagues of the
Sanhedrin of Jabneh, the sole rallying
point, after the catastrophe, of Jewry’s
continued confraternity, gave expression
to the exclusive religious character of
the existence of Israel in the notable
pronouncement: “Israel has lost its land
only that it might proselytize the world.”
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