IN every crisis, even in those which have swept whole nations from existence, the Jew has always found himself with one inalienable possession--his faith. There is something mystifying about the persistence through so many vicissitudes of a religion which commands respect from neighbors who see in it a powerful inspiration, while the Jew himself, especially the Jew more fortunately placed in the general community, endeavors so often to cast it off as outworn and impracticable. It is the Jew himself who has misled the rest of the world into a delusion. He has seemed to consider himself, and the faith with which he is bound up, inferior. In his endeavor to take on the color of his environment, he has sought to lay aside all that was old, and of this the religion of his fathers was a part. But a faith as strong and as far-reaching as Judaism cannot be dropped out of the life into which it has been ingrained, and hence the Jew has been hard put to cover it up, to hide it, or to attempt its modification to fit the fashion in religions. The inevitable reaction on the non-Jewish part of the community has been a feeling of mystification, and, following on that, suspicion and distrust. It is this which has undermined confidence in the Jews as a people--their negation of that which is their valuable heritage. For Judaism is not merely tradition, a thing to be reverenced as a relic; it is a thing to be put to everyday use. This practical and vitalized Judaism is the real salvation for which the Jews have been groping, all the while under the delusion that it was anywhere but near at hand. Such a rejuvenated faith would mean an end of that homelessness which is accountable for much of the Jew's displacement in the world's life. And though the remedy has been intimate to him these many years he has failed to make positive use of it. It is true that the Zionists have been striving for a geographical base for Judaism. But a geographical base is never more than an outward expression of a people's unity; it is an excellent starting point, but as an end in itself it is nothing. The Jews had a geographical base for their start; thereby they were enabled to build up a unified result, the Jewish spirit. It is this which, if recognized as a positive fact, will take from the Jew his feeling of homelessness, and from his neighbor the notion that the Jew is a member of a tribe forever unestablished and purposeless. It is around a spiritual core that the Jews as a people must build, around that central force which has thus far held them intact. _The Spiritual Service of the Jew_