THE METHOD OF JUDAISM
influenced the Jew's business dealings, his relation to his wife, child, friend, so did the Sabbath influence the impulse within him to defy his milieu and to soar ever upwards.
The ideals of the Torah owe it to the Mitzvah that What the
Gentile
Lacks.they have become living powers for good. Without the guidance which the Jew received from the Mitzvah, he would have stumbled on the way, he would have succumbed to the voices which call for assimilation, the extinction of the Jewish type. Mitzvah gave the Jew his training in ideal matters, in the service of the idea. The non-Jew has no Mitzvah, hence nothing that will accustom him habitually to consult the ideal. He is a man destitute of these character-forming exercises and so he falls a ready victim to the causes which make for man's degradation.
The Jew puts his ethical ideals above everything else. Conscious of the fact that his famous fidelity to these ideals is due to the wonderful influence of the Jewish life, he is determined in the teeth of all opposition to continue observing the laws and customs which have been found so beneficent in the formation of our national characteristics. Judaism teaches that the great duty of a people is not so much the production of supermen, as the training of kind, upright average men. We do emphatically deny the charge that it is our task or our luck to produce intellectual monsters. Our contribution to the common treasure of man lies in the fact that we are the most passionate force for righteousness. Neither Bergson, nor Einstein are an essentially Jewish contribution, though we have every reason to be proud of these great men—our real representatives are the prophets of the olden days as of recent years, who, men of Jewish blood, have helped the nations to understand that not by force nor by power, but by God's spirit of justice can man be saved.
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