Obedience to the Will of God, the suppression of the
human desires before that Will, is a great ideal.
But the Jew wished to realise that he was obeying,
that he was making the self-suppression. He was
not satisfied with a general law of holiness:
he felt impelled to holiness in detail, to a life
in which the laws of bodily hygiene were obeyed as
part of the same law of holiness that imposed ritual
and moral purity. Much of the intricate system,
of observance briefly summarised in this paragraph,
a system which filled the Jew’s life, is passing
away. This is largely because Jews are surrendering
their own original theory of life and religion.
Modern Judaism seems to have no use for the ritual
system. The older Judaism might retort that, if
that be so, it has no use for the modern Judaism.
It is, however, clear that modern Judaism now realises
the mistake made by the Reformers of the mid-nineteenth
century. Hence we are hearing, and shall no doubt
hear more and more, of the modification of observances
in Judaism rather than of their abolition.
CHAPTER VI
JEWISH MYSTICISM
’Judaism is often called the religion of reason.
It is this, but it is also the religion of the soul.
It recognises the value of that mystic insight, those
indefinable intuitions which, taking up the task at
the point where the mind impotently abandons it, carries
us straight into the presence of the King. Thus
it has found room both for the keen speculator on
theological problems and for the mystic who, because
he feels God, declines to reason about Him—for
a Maimonides and a Mendelssohn, but also for a Nachmanides,
a Vital, and a Luria’ (M. Joseph, op.
cit., p. 47). Used in a vague way, mysticism
stands for spiritual inwardness. Religion without
mysticism, said Amiel, is a rose without perfume.
This saying is no more precise and no more informing
than Matthew Arnold’s definition of religion
as morality touched with emotion. Neither mysticism
nor an emotional touch makes religion. They are
as often as not concomitants of a pathological state
which is the denial of religion. But if mysticism
means a personal attitude towards God in which the
heart is active as well as the mind, then religion
cannot exist without mysticism.
When, however, we regard mysticism as what it very
often is, as an antithesis to institutional religion
and a revolt against authority and forms, then it
may seem at first sight paradoxical to recognise the
mystic’s claim to the hospitality of Judaism.
That a religion which produced the Psalter, and not
only produced it, but used it with never a break,
should be a religion, with intensely spiritual possibilities,
and its adherents capable of a vivid sense of the nearness
of God, with an ever-felt and never-satisfied longing
for communion with Him, is what we should fully expect.
But this expectation would rather make us look for
an expression on the lines of the 119th Psalm, in which
the Law is so markedly associated with freedom and
spirituality. Judaism, after all, allowed to
authority and Law a supreme place. But the mystic
relies on his own intuitions, depends on his personal
experiences. Judaism, on the other hand, is a
scheme in which personal experiences only count in
so far as they are brought into the general fund of
the communal experience.
