10
DETROIT JEWISH CHRONICLE and the Legal Chronicle
SILVER
(Continued from Page 8)
A Joyous Pesach to All
CONTINENTAL
BAKING CO.
2915 GRAND RIVER
CHERRY 2330
Sincere Holiday Greetings
NAJOR'S MARKET
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We Deliver
A
day did, in terms of a steady,
horizontal advance, an unbroken
march forward, rather than in
terms of a succession of cyclical
movements which, over and again,
come full again and which re-
sult only in a slight net advance
for mankind. There were ample
warnings all around them, por-
tents which less romantic eyes
did appraise more realistically—
signs of an irreconcilable opposi-
tion, an indurate racial, cultural,
economic and religious hostility
which had not and would not
accept the humanistic and demo-
cratic synthesis which a revolu-
tionary middle-class capitalism had
popularized in the ninenteenth
century, and which was destined
sooner or later to disintegrate.
This many-sided and variously
motivated anti-Semitism gained
momentum at the same time and
almost at the same pace as Jew-
ish political emancipation. It was
not a reaction. It was a parallel
development just as the Inquisi-
Joyous Pesach
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Con and the Ghetto paralleled the
Renaissance and the Reformation.
This is the tragic fact which
seems to escape so many students
of anti-Semitism. The story of
Jewish emancipation in Europe
from the day after the French
Revolution to the day before the
Nazi Revolution is the story of
political positions captured in the
face of stubborn and sullen oppo-
sition, which left the emancipated
minority encamped within an un-
beaten and unreconciled opposi-
tio. At the slightest provocation,
and as soon as things go out of
order, the opposition returned to
the attack and inflicted grievous
wounds. In our day, stirred by
the great politico-economic strug-
gles which were tearing nations
apart, this never-failing, never-
reconciled opposition swept over
the Jewish political and economic
positions in Europe and com-
pletely demolished them. There is
an electric chord which connects
the era of Fichte in Germany
with its feral cry of "hep-hep",
and the era of Hitler and its
cry "Jude verrecke". And so for
the rest of Europe. The Damas-
cus affair of 1840 links up with
the widespread reaction after the
Revolution of 1848, the Mortara
Affair in Italy, the Christian So-
cialist movement in the era of
Bismarck, the Tisza-Ezlar Affair
in Hungary, the revival of the
blood accusation in Bohemia, the
pogroms in the eighties in Rus-
sia, La France Juive and the
Dreyfus Affair in France.
The First World War, which
made the world "safe for democ-
racy" and granted the Jews of
Central Europe not only the rights
of citizenship but even minority
rights, brought also in its wake
the most thorough-going brutal
and annihilationist anti-Semitism
that Israel has ever experienced.
And now again, in the Second
World War, many Jews are hop-
ing to achieve through an Allied
victory what an Allied victory
failed to give them after the
last war, what a whole century
of enlightenment, liberaism and
intellectual progress failed to give
them—peace and security. They
are again confusing formal politi-
cal equality with immunity from
economic and social pressures.
Yes, much has changed in the
last one hundred years, but much
more has resisted change. The
immemorial problem of our na-
tional homelessness, the principle
source of our millenial tragedy,
remains as stark and as menac-
ing as ever. Yet Jews, especially
those of our persuasion, are
again trying to circumvent it with
wishful thinking, with day-dream-
ing about an Atlantic Charter or
the Four Freedoms, with clever
homiletics, or are hoping to lay
it to rest with patriotic charms
and incantations—just as they
did a hundred years ago, and
through all the intervening years.
Why should we celebrate cen-
tennials of religious institutions?
What seek we among the forms
and faces of things long since
dead? What shall we bring back
from the frontiers of distant
years? Not the evidences of
change. They are of little moment
and there is little consolation in
them. But rather the evidences of
changelessness and continuity. In
that knowledge there is both pride
and humility and the strength
which belongs to mature men.
Judaism is concernel with the
unchanging needs of man and of
society, the needs which take on
new forms in new settings but
which remain fundamentally the
same—the basic and perennial con-
flicts and adjustments in individ-
ual and collective lives. From
Abraham and Moses to the last
of the great and wise teachers
of our faith there stretches an
unbroken chain of spiritual con-
tinuity, changeless principles in
mutable forms which were the
fixed points of reference for each
generation. Each generation faced
the same problems: how achieve
freedom under the sovereignty of
God, justice under the mandate of
His law and dignity in kinship
with Him; how knowledge was to
be made whole through the fear
of God, and courage heightened
through trust in Him; how broth-
erhood and peace could be cove-
nanted in the sight of Him who
is Father of all men and all na-
tions.
Judaism has offered men the
faith and the code sufficient and
adequate to every age. Men have
not heeded it. Jews have not
heeded it. Theirs was the inade-
quacy, theirs the insufficiency.
Many believed that mankind could
dispense with Israel's faith and
code and peace without reference,
to God and the techniques of reli-
gion. But they achieved only dic-
tatornhip, slavery, littleness of
stature, fear, hate and war. They
put their hope not in spiritual con-
March 2 - , 194,
vversion, not in moral regenera-
tion but in a precipitous scien-
tific and intellectual progress
which has now hurled rider, horse
and chariot alike into one bloody
and ruinous tangle.
The leaders of Reform Judaism,
too, were encouraged to expect
the quick advent of a universal
religion of peace and good will,
not because of any religious re-
vivalism which was transpiring
in the world in their day—there
was none—but because of that
same breath-taking scientific ad-
vance. They drew unwarranted
conclusions from irrelevant prem-
ises. There is never any forward
movement in society without an
inward movement in man.
The pioneer reformers and their
dicsiples after them were good and
loyal Jews but they were too zeal-
ous to "modernize" Judaism, and
too self-conscious about modernity.
There was too much emphasis in
their thought and speech upon
"reform", "change," progress,"
too little upon "rebirth," "return,"
"tracing back to God." Nothing is
so shallow and and ephemeral as
modernity. The very word sug-
gests a mode, a fashion, an im-
provised and passing version which
has its practical utility, to be sure,
spiritual essence, to its eadurin
distinctiveness through al! time
and ages, to that which like th
flowing current moves and ehang s
and yet remains the sain. , , Qui t
consciously they are me' cinent
of "return" to marvelous And d5
cisive beginnings so as t.. reek
ture an ageless truth. The:: neve
set out to adjust men to
dal, political or economie envil
onment. They aim to tea!' they
free from their environmeti• The
demand of them surrende!•. sell
denial, renunciation of \voil a
o co ffie u r fo it.thse nd i nt e e orm es p tsn
e , and the
the
sati•.as o
spiritual blessings and peace. Th
greatest religions were those whie
made the greatest demand. upo
their followers and which calk
for the most rigorous disc I 1.Iine
but which must not be confused
with that which is of the essence
and of the eternal. They were too
eager to accommodate, to facili-
tate, and, strange as it may seem,
to conofrm — not to tradition, of
course, but to the most recent
thought and practice of their day,
the tradition of recency. They
were sufficiently intellectual in
their critique, but religious re-
formation is achieved only by mys-
tics who are concerned not with
the recency of their doctrines but
with the immediacy of their reli-
gious experiences.
Great spiritual movements break
not only with the past but with
the present as well. They never
attempt to "modernize" religion
but to restore it to its timeless
Passover Greetings
DIBBLE
COLOR CO.
PRATT & LAMBERT PAINT
AND VARNISH
•
1497 East Grand Blvd.
at Canton
PLaza 1520
TO MY JEWISH FRIENDS:
SINCERE GOOD WISHES
FOR A JOYOUS
PASSOVER!
P. H. HARRISON
A JOYOUS PESACH TO ALL!
Keystone Engineering
Co., Inc.
ALEX G. MARION, Pres.
100 E. Cicotte
Ecorse, Mich.
Phone VI. 1-8656
We extend sincere good wishes for a
Passover filled with happiness and
blessed with full measure of prosperity
and may these wishes continue to find
fulfillment into the many years beyond.
CHARLES H. LOTT
Manager
DETROIT-LELMID -HOTEL
DETROIT. MICHIGAN
CASS—BAGLEY