Jews -- Periodicals; Jews -- United States -- Periodicals
_Professor of Rabbinical Literature and the Semitic Languages,
Columbia University_
[Illustration]
I HAVE been asked to say a word of greeting to the readers of the
Menorah Journal. I do so with pleasure; indeed with much satisfaction.
The Menorah students at our colleges and universities will now be
bound together by a new bond, one that will give them a more unified
direction and converge their efforts toward the goal which the Menorah
has set for itself.
I should like to think that it is not entirely fortuitous that this
added impulse is given to our work just at this time. We all feel that
the present is a moment when the very foundations of our ethical
life--both as individuals and as groups--have received a rude shock.
At such a time--more than ever--we need to understand and to bear in
mind the great teachings which Jewish sages have given to the world,
as their and our contribution to the moral foundations of society.
Such teachings were, in most cases, not decked out in the tawdry
trappings of a recondite and far-fetched philosophy, nor garnished
with the decorations of superlogical terminology, nor even put forth
with lusty rhetoric. They were simple and to the point, because they
were founded upon deep religious convictions.
One of these teachings occurs to me as I write these lines: "The moral
condition of the world depends upon three things--truth, justice and
peace." Have we outgrown such teaching? Have the astounding advances
made during the last one hundred years in the science of physical
living brought us any nearer to the true inwardness of moral living
than the ethical principles put forth by these early teachers? As our
hearts are rent by the sufferings of those who are caught in the
meshes of the terrible war now raging, and as our intellects are
befogged by the various excuses advanced in justification of carnage
and wholesale destruction, do not the simple words of the old Hebrew
sage appear to us as a beacon-light in the surrounding darkness?
"Truth, Justice, Peace!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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