Page:Leo Jung - Foundations of Judaism (1923).pdf/17

 have been preached from innumerable pulpits, on in numerable platforms, these ideals have been explained in countless books and newspaper articles, there is hardly a generation which has not endeavored a restatement, nay, there is hardly a man, who does not now and then think of them, discuss them, profess them—and yet the present century shows a tremendous deficit in all but money, a deficit in good will, in kindness, in the habit of heart which we call culture!

How is it that the dominating religion which has written social virtue on its baptized flag, which scorns us Jews as insufficiently sensitive to its greatness, that the Church which had q'DMI HDDN for centuries the ideals hidebound in ponderous commentaries on Jesus and the Gospels, the Church, which had the preachers, all free dom and all power, that this church admits today that its achievements have fallen lamentably short of its expectations whereas we, the weakest race, the most persecuted, a people without a home, dependent for our safety, nay for our very life on the whim of the Goy, surrounded on all sides by hatred and envy, never free from soul-crushing experience, that we, in spite of twenty centuries of systematic attempts at throttling our human dignity, our sense of honor and of self-respect, that we are not only alive today but that we are still fired with the same idealism, still aglow with the conviction that the inner sense of life is Godliness, and that the nations will yet come streaming to the mount of Zion to the God of Jacob, to learn of His Laws to walk in His ways?

I am not one who loves to extol his own people. I am too sensitive of our own faults, of the terrible deterioration of the Jew. Yet has the Jew retained his sterling and characteristic virtues: a passion for justice and a passion for kindness. However low individuals have fallen—and amidst the terror and shame of Gentile cruelty it is only natural that even Jews forget their Jewishness—