5. We may take it for granted that this naïve conception of the resurrection could not be permanent, and so was modified to include a double resurrection: the first, national, to usher in the Messianic kingdom, and the other, universal, to usher in the everlasting life of the future. The former offered scant room for the heathen world, at best only for those who had actually joined the ranks of Judaism; the latter, however, included the last judgment for all souls and thus opened the way for the salvation of the righteous among the nations as well as the people of Israel. At this point the conception of resurrection led to higher and more spiritual ideas, as has been shown in Chapter XLIII. 6. However, the belief in the resurrection of the body, though expressed in the ancient liturgy, is in such utter contradiction to our entire attitude toward both science and religion, that it may be considered obsolete for the modern Jew. Orthodoxy, which clings to it in formal loyalty to tradition, regards it as a miracle which God will perform in the future, exactly like the many Biblical miracles which defy reason. 7. The Zionist movement has given many Jews a new attitude toward the national resurrection of Israel. The nationalists expect the Jewish nation to awaken from a sleep of eighteen hundred years to new greatness in its ancient home, not as a religious, but as a political body, and in renouncing all allegiance to the priestly mission of Israel and its ancestral faith they are as remote from genuine Orthodoxy as from Reform Judaism. They assert that the soul of the Jewish people requires a national body rooted in its ancient soil in order that it may fulfill its appointed task among the nations; they even go so far as to declare all the achievements brought about by the assimilation of the culture of the surrounding nations to be a deterioration of the genuine character of the Jewish nation. The fact is that, as in nature there is nowhere a resurrection of the dead but an ever renewed regeneration of life, so is the history of the Jew and of Judaism a continuous process of regeneration manifested at every great turning-point of history, when the ideas and cultural elements of a new civilization exert their powerful influence on life and thought. There never was, nor will be an exclusively Jewish culture. It is the wondrous power of assimilation of the Jew which ever created and fashioned his culture anew. That which constitutes the peculiarity of the Jew and his life force is his religion fostered through the ages, preserved amidst the most antagonistic influences and hostile environments, and ever rejuvenated by its unique universalistic spirit when revived by contact with kindred movements. To maintain and propagate this, his religion in all lands and amidst all civilizations, is the task assigned to him by Providence, until God’s Kingdom has been established all over the globe. Chapter LV. Israel and the Heathen Nations