Page:Jews and Judaism (Morris Jastrow).djvu/11

 which the term Judaism is used contributes its share—a very large one—to that confusion which is one of the most characteristic traits of the present state of the question concerning the relation of Jews to Judaism. You may believe what you please, but you have no right to define Judaism as you please. I shall come back to this presently. In the collection of legends and tales known as the Midrash, there is a story told to illustrate the peculiar hospitality of the wicked inhabitants of Sodom. It is said that they had a room, containing a bed of a certain size, which they placed at the disposal of strangers. If the bed was too short, they cut off the stranger's legs until he could accommodate himself to it; if it was too long, they stretched the stranger's limbs. It is much in the same way that Judaism is treated to-day. We stretch it or shorten it to suit our convenience; we fashion it according to our views. Now, I do not believe that we are obliged to fashion our views according to it, but we are certainly not justified in compounding any mixture we choose and labelling it Judaism. It is because of this pernicious habit of defining Judaism in an arbitrary fashion that we are making such little, if any, headway in the solution of the problems before us. Every man means something else when he says "Judaism." No wonder that it becomes something vague and indeterminate; no wonder that finally nobody knows exactly what it means, because it is used for anything and everything.

I have said it is better to make our interpretation of it too wide rather than too narrow, but I repeat there is such a thing as a too wide interpretation, so wide, that it becomes "vague and indeterminate." I may have erred in this particular myself. If so, I am perfectly ready to acknowledge my error. But the experience of only one year, combined with as careful thought and observation as I am capable of, has convinced me that we are on the wrong road, that this loose interpretation of a term, which is if not perfectly definite, at least moderately definite in its character, must cease, if we wish to understand the real issue before us. In order to understand the relation of Jews to Judaism, we must for the