Jews -- Periodicals; Jews -- United States -- Periodicals
To-day the term "charity" has given way to a new equivalent, with a
somewhat different connotation. This new equivalent is "social
service." That it should be urged, as Mr. Lewis urges it, upon liberal
Judaism is simply another indication of the evanescing adherence of
that sect to the corporate life of the Jewish people. Although "social
service" carries with it more of the sense of justice than the term
charity, it is still, in intention, a charitable thing. It is not a
thing done through the inevitable forms of right social organization,
but through the gracious good will of a kindly individual. It still
maintains the Christian quality of "grace" which is a condescension, a
going down, a philanthropy. It stands in contrast to _law_, which
knows no such qualities, and the call which Mr. Lewis makes to liberal
Judaists for a special kind of social service is itself a
demonstration that "liberal Judaism" thus far has little in common
with the substance of Jewish life. Indeed his whole book is a
demonstration of this fact, for of the six chapters that it contains
only one has anything to say of social service as such in the present
day, while four are analyses, not of charity, but of the law of
righteousness as it operated in the Jewish polity, both in Palestine
and in the Diaspora. Even the actual charity of the Middle Ages
carries a quality of obligation and socially ordained necessity which
is derived from the basic law of the Jewish people.
_The Hope of Liberal Judaism_
BUT to-day, while the great Jewish masses still live, more or less
adequately under the basic law and exercise such righteousness as they
may in the division of obligation which the laws of the Galuth lands
compel, the classes are divorced from its rule altogether. The call
with which Mr. Lewis closes his book,--
"We must teach the masses of our people, upon whom the
Judaism of yesterday has lost hold, that their
salvation lies in liberal Judaism, which is beginning
to find itself to-day and which will become the
Judaism of to-morrow,"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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