Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 129.djvu/17

Rh of unkind symbolism came in the form of a plaque by the daughter of the venerable head of the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati, a seminary for the training of Reform rabbis—a plaque adorned, in proof of the enduring vitality of the Synagogue, with various Jewish symbols, such as the ram's-horn, the prayer-shawl, the palm-branch, and so forth. One who knows how these symbols have fallen into desuetude, and how much the sponsors of Reform have contributed toward their obsolescence, can but marvel at the fact that irony can be so subtle, so insidiously unconscious. The truth is that Sargent's symbolism is both right and wrong. It is wrong if applied to the Synagogue, it is right if applied to the synagogues. Synagogues are dead, but the Synagogue lives. The Pattern in the Mount cannot be destroyed, even though the copies that we make of it are poor portraits of the Ideal.

So far as the synagogues are concerned, they seem beyond resuscitation. There is little left. Talmudical Judaism has broken down it seems, irrevocably. The old ceremonial law is honored more in the breach than in the observance. The dietary laws linger, apparently as an occasion for periodical meat-riots and an excuse for profiteering. The Saturday Sabbath is all but gone: even in thickly populated Jewish sections there is open selling and buying on the Seventh Day, although both merchants and customers are Jews. Recently, when a wealthy uptown congregation sold its synagogue to Seventh Day Adventists, malicious tongues remarked that for the first time in the history of this 'temple' its congregants would be Sabbath-observers.

Add to all this that the old training based on rabbinics is gone, but no new culture has yet taken its place. A generation ago, Hebrew learning was widespread; nowadays, Jewish parents refuse to have their children taught in the sacred tongue of the Prophets, for they regard it as old-fashioned. What, then, is left? A lifeless formalism that no one takes very seriously; here and there a pathetic bit of folklore in connection with death—or marriage customs; a little ostentatious charity; all of this scarcely relieved by the annual visit to the synagogue on the Day of Atonement. It is as if the spirit had long fled the husk. The old words fail to move. The old ideals fail to thrill. And there is no new Sinai from whose thundering top the God of Fathers might speak to his back-sliding children.

One does not deplore the loss of customs and ceremonies, for where religion is vital, new forms and rites can be evolved; but one deplores the loss of the transfiguring power of faith, the mystic grace of a triumphant belief. One deplores the coarsening of the texture of Jewish life. If this process of decadence is not somehow stayed, the Jew is in imminent danger of becoming a Sabbathless, religionless devotee of business and pleasure—a being without a sense of God, with no ear for the vast, tender suggestions of Eternity, no understanding of the spiritual meaning of human life. And how distressing such a change would be—from the Man of Sorrows, who bore the pains of the world, to the creature whom nothing hurts any more!

One looks vainly, in the circumstances, for an enlightened leadership to submit the Jew to the hard mercy of self-scrutiny and thus point the way to Jewish regeneration. And Jewish leadership has long passed from the rabbinate to the laity. Formerly learning was the standard of leadership; to-day, it is wealth. Nestroy, Viennese dramatist of the first half of the nineteenth century, represents in one of his plays the prophet Isaiah addressing the people; but as he pours out upon them the lava of his volcanic spirit, they nudge each other sneeringly and say: 'Und das lebt von