Page:Leo Jung - Foundations of Judaism (1923).pdf/22

 The Jew has been taught by the Torah to look at everything from one standpoint only. He asks himself: Is this work or movement likely to improve the character of me and the fellowman? If it is, I hail it as a friend. If it bring no such results or perhaps prove a source of evil, I must reject it.

Hence the Jew would remain deaf to the appeal of great men of art and learning, of great works of art and learning, unless he satisfied himself that their influence would be an unalloyedly good one. So do Judaism and the Jew view every single individual, every corporate effort. And out of this great sense of duty springs the Jew's great sense of his dignity. Just as Tsedoko is only justice, so is salvation only justice. With us Jews salvation is not an act of sheer grace however much of God's love is in it—bestowed upon a race damned and doomed, but the just fulfillment of God's promise to such of His children as strive to perfect themselves in agreement with His commandment. Our own deeds can bring us near Him, our own deeds remove us from His heart. Nobody stands between the Jew and his God.

What Judaism as a system teaches us is unity of mind, harmony of life. It insists again and again upon education as the preparation for the Jewish life. But it also teaches that all education which does not make for the development of character rather than the accumulation of dry knowledge is a sinful loss of time. Neither mere nationalist abstraction is Judaism, nor the "reductio ad absurdum," in our case the condensation of living truth about God and man into some ethical commonplace, but the fulness of the Jewish life is Judaism.