The Covenant conferred a distinction and imposed a
duty. It was a bond between a gracious God and
a grateful Israel. It dignified history, for
it interpreted history in terms of providence and purpose;
it transfigured virtue by making virtue service; it
was the salt of life, for how could present degradation
demoralise, seeing that God was in it, to fulfil His
part of the bond, to hold Israel as His jewel, though
Rome might despise? The Covenant made the Jew
self-confident and arrogant, but these very faults
were needed to save him. It was his only defence
against the world’s scorn. He forgot that
the correlative of the Covenant was Isaiah’s
’Covenant-People’—missionary
to the Gentiles and the World. He relegated his
world-mission (which Christianity and Islam in part
gloriously fulfilled) to a dim Messianic future, and
was content if in his own present he remained faithful
to his mission to himself.
Above all, the legacy from the past came to Judaism
hallowed and humanised by all the experience of redemption
and suffering which had marked Israel’s course
in ages past, and was to mark his course in ages to
come. The Exodus, the Exile, the Maccabean heroism,
the Roman catastrophe; Prophet, Wise Man, Priest and
Scribe,—all had left their trace.
Judaism was a religion based on a book and on a tradition;
but it was also a religion based on a unique experience.
The book might be misread, the tradition encumbered,
but the experience was eternally clear and inspiring.
It shone through the Roman Diaspora as it afterwards
illuminated the Roman Ghetto, making the present tolerable
by the memory of the past and the hope of the future.
CHAPTER II
RELIGION AS LAW
The feature of Judaism which first attracts an outsider’s
attention, and which claims a front place in this
survey, is its ‘Nomism’ or ‘Legalism.’
Life was placed under the control of Law. Not
only morality, but religion also, was codified.
‘Nomism,’ it has been truly said, ’has
always formed a fundamental trait of Judaism, one
of whose chief aims has ever been to mould life in
all its varying relations according to the Law, and
to make obedience to the commandments a necessity and
a custom’ (Lauterbach, Jewish Encyclopedia,
ix. 326). Only the latest development of Judaism
is away from this direction. Individualism is
nowadays replacing the olden solidarity. Thus,
at the Central Conference of American Rabbis, held
in July 1906 at Indianapolis, a project to formulate
a system of laws for modern use was promptly rejected.
The chief modern problem in Jewish life is just this:
To what extent, and in what manner, can Judaism still
place itself under the reign of Law?
