Page:Leo Jung - Foundations of Judaism (1923).pdf/15

 Moses saw the bush whose fire can never be quenched. He spoke to one nation at one moment at one spot, and His words sound through all the centuries, audible in all countries to all nations. This voice comes to the bushman and he falls down groveling before his grimacing idol, His breath touches the criminal and stays his hand, the message reaches the martyr and he smiles through torture and dies happy, with Shema on his lips.

And man's eyes were God taught man the ideal. And man's eyes were opened and he saw connections of which he had never dreamt, and he saw beauty behind terror, and honor in what appeared shameful. God taught us, every generation, that we have a special dignity in that we are not isolated factors with isolated aims and limits, but that every age within the ages is a link in the eternal chain of human fellowship, a rung on the eternal ladder which con nects heaven and earth. That this our dignity consists in our being alive to the tremendous task of human history that every son surpass his father, every daughter transcend her mother, that every generation retain not only, but increase and refine the spiritual possessions into which they were born.

All joy of life for the thinking man and woman depends on our seeing ourselves as part of the whole. "The union between God and man, between the labor of our hand and the craving of our soul, between the mystical and the obvious, between the fleeting of today and the eternity of Godcreated man."

Judaism introduced the ideal as the illuminating force of life into the concert of the nations. And with the ideal it created another idea, unknown before, the idea of the Fellowman. Before our Torah was revealed there was the sad, senseless spectacle of brute masses pressing on in a