A Book of Jewish Thoughts. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ you will of the Judaism of the Middle Ages; call it narrow; deride it as superstitious; unless lost to all sense of justice, or without power to dive beneath the surface of the seeming to the roots of the real, you cannot but witness to the incontrovertible fact that for sweetness and spirituality of life, the Jew of the Ghetto, the Jew of the Middle Ages, the Jew under the yoke of the Talmud, challenges the whole world.

      E. G. HIRSCH, 1895.

THE JEWISH WOMAN

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      IN the days of horror of the later Roman Empire, throughout the time of the migration of nations, it was not war alone that destroyed and annihilated all those peoples of which, despite their former world-dominating greatness, nothing remains but their name. It was rather the ensuing demoralization of home life. This is proved—it cannot be repeated too often—by the Jews; for they suffered more severely and more cruelly by wars than any other nation; but, among them, the inmost living germ of morality—strict discipline and family devotion—was at all times preserved. This wonderful and mysterious preservation of the Jewish people is due to the Jewish woman. This is her glory, not alone in the history of her own people, but in the history of the world.

      M. LAZARUS.

      THE Jew’s home has rarely been his ‘castle’. Throughout the ages it has been something far higher—his sanctuary.

      J. H. HERTZ.

      BE careful not to cause woman to weep, for God counts her tears. Israel was redeemed from Egypt on account of the virtue of its women. He who weds a good woman, it is as if he had fulfilled all the precepts of the Law.

      TALMUD.

THE JEWISH MOTHER

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      JEWISH custom bids the Jewish mother, after her preparations for the Sabbath have been completed on Friday evening, kindle the Sabbath lamp. That is symbolic of the Jewish woman’s influence on her own home, and through it upon larger circles. She is the inspirer of a pure, chaste, family life whose hallowing influences are incalculable; she is the centre of all spiritual endeavours, the confidante and fosterer of every undertaking. To her the Talmudic sentence applies: ‘It is woman alone through whom God’s blessings are vouchsafed to a house’.

      HENRIETTA SZOLD, 1893.

YIDDISH CRADLE SONG

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      O! HUSH thee, my darling, sleep soundly my son,

      Sleep soundly and sweetly till day has begun;

      For under the bed of good children at night

      There lies, till the morning, a kid snowy white.

      We’ll send it to market to buy Sechora,

      While my little lad goes to study Torah.

      Sleep soundly at night and learn Torah by day,

      Then thou’ll be a Rabbi when I have grown grey.

      But I’ll give thee to-morrow ripe nuts and a toy,

      If thou’lt sleep as I bid thee, my own little boy.

      (Trans. Alice Lucas.)

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

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      IT seems to me that if the development of the religious sense is omitted from education, the most exalted idea of goodness is left out. Life is so much the poorer for being shorn of the halo of high spiritual aspiration. Instead of a fixed and lofty ideal of life and conduct, based on the highest conception of Divine Perfection of which the human mind is capable, there prevails a limited and fluctuating ideal, subject to the chance influences of surroundings and associates, and coloured by the social grade and worldly interests of each individual.

      JULIA M. COHEN, 1907.

      THE thread on which the different good qualities of human beings are strung as pearls, is the fear of God. When the fastenings of this fear are unloosed, the pearls roll in all directions and are lost one by one.

      BOOK OF MORALS, 15th cent.

      THE knowledge of Hebrew is the golden hinge upon which our national and religious existence turns. Flowing down from the hills of eternity, the Hebrew language has been set apart by God as the receptacle of truths destined to sway mankind and humanize the world.

      SABATO MORAIS, 1876.

THE SACRED TONGUE1

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      THE Synagogue service is essentially the expression of the soul of collective Israel. In the Synagogue we meet as Jews, there in prayer, in aspiration, in confession of faith, to carry on the stream of spiritual effort which has flowed unbroken through the ages ever since Israel became conscious of himself. Therefore the prayers will not merely voice private needs and modern ideas, but will chiefly speak of Israel. And so they will largely be in Hebrew, Israel’s historic language. You may get rid of Hebrew, but with it you will get rid of the Synagogue too, of the Synagogue as a living organism, as the well-spring of Jewish feeling and the inspiration of Jewish life. Nor is this all. The claim of Hebrew, though bound up with the interests of public worship, yet transcends them. It will meet you whenever you open your Jewish history, whenever you open your Bible. As long as we remain Jews and call the Bible our own, the Tongue in which it is written must be inestimably sacred to us.

      MORRIS JOSEPH, 1907.

THE HEBREW LANGUAGE

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      THE Hebrew language is the great depository of all that is best in the soul-life of the Congregation of Israel. Without it we will become severed from the great Tree which is life unto those that cling to it. Hellenistic Judaism2 is the only one known to history which dared to make this experiment of dispensing with the Sacred Language. The result was death. It withered away and terminated in total and wholesale apostasy from Judaism. Let us not deceive ourselves. There is no future in this country for a Judaism that resists either the English or the Hebrew language.

      S. SCHECHTER, 1904.

      THERE is a vast storehouse filled СКАЧАТЬ