One Destiny (continued)

      Who will dare to assert that the fact that the Jews have survived every trial of their faith is a completely natural phenomenon--that it was due entirely to their own will and strength of character? He who dares to say this is either spiritually a cripple who is entirely incapable of comprehending a transcendental occurrence, or a godless cynic whose heart is a nest for the lowest passions. Go down on your knees, man, before the miracle in front of your eyes, the miracle of the preservation of Israel. If ever there has occurred in human history an event that frightens us with its incomprehensibleness and unrealizability, an event which is shrouded in a veil of profound mysticism, it is this miracle of the survival of the Jewish people.
      Every living Jew is a part of that miracle. The Jew as an idea, the historical Jew, is a mystic phenomenon, a Lazarus risen from the grave, because we are ignorant of the powers that have withheld him from the death and disappearance which have threatened to engulf him right down to our own time.
      No historian, no philosopher can explain it satisfactorily. We can see in it only the will of God. Jews have been forced to survive, through all their sufferings, not for the sake of themselves as individuals but for the sake of the group, for the sake of the whole of the world of which they are a part.
      If this was accomplished through the strength of their own character, then the Jews. are the most powerful, the most worthy, and the strongest people of the entire human race.
      No, I do not ascribe these virtues to the Jews. Jews are just as weak, selfish, and comfort-seeking as any other people. They have survived in spite of themselves, because they were forced to do it by a superior power.
      The survival of the Jews was not simply a caprice of their own or of history but a product of the fate marked out for them by God, a mission to which they are assigned, and which was kneaded into the very embryo of their existence, and forces them, against their will, to carry upon themselves the yoke of Jewry, to withstand every pain, sorrow, and persecution, to burn in every fire, to fall into every abyss--and yet to survive in spite of all. Not for themselves, not on their own behalf, but for a higher purpose, for the whole of humanity, as God had intended them.
      The whole of Jewish history bears witness to it.
      We are eternal. Evil may triumph for a space, but good is everlasting.
      This is the blessing which God has bestowed upon us--the preservation of Israel.

      According to Jewish sources, Armilos, a kind of anti-Christ, will gather around himself all the forces of evil and lead them into battle against the Messiah of God. The description given of Armilos is characteristic. Among other defects, he is deaf in one ear. Whenever the truth is being told, he turns his deaf ear toward it; but let someone tell a lie and he immediately turns his good ear in that direction.
      What is the power of the anti-Christ? The power of God is love; the anti-Christ works through hate. Great powers have been yielded to the anti-Christ. He has access everywhere. He can be found everywhere, lie does not stop at any boundaries. Sometimes he can be found in a den of thieves; sometimes he appears in the heart of a mob and incites it to kill innocent human beings; at still another time he appears even in the arena of the church and drives the people to wild deeds.
      Whenever the anti-Christ appears, he sows hatred and envy among people and tears up by the roots the growth of love which Jesus of Nazareth has planted.
      Anti-Semitism is one of the tried methods which the Anti-Christ uses to disrupt the work of Jesus of Nazareth. We see that anti-Semitism has not been strong enough to destroy the Jewish people. It could bring anguish and torture, sorrow and tears, burnings and murders of individuals, of whole communities, of entire countries. But if a Jewish settlement was torn up from one country, God had already planted the seeds of another in a different country. The anti-Christ has bent all of his energies to uproot not merely a single settlement but the whole of Israel, because it is Israel that is his greatest enemy, the barrier to his success, the disrupter of his work. But against Israel he has proved too weak. his sword strikes against its armor and is shattered.
      For God has surrounded Israel with a ring of fire and does not permit the destroyer to come near it. He punishes and thrashes it, but he never destroys it.
      God needed the remnant of Israel. He has saved it for a mission which it is to do in the world.
      But the anti-Christ, wherever he has planted his seed of hate, has destroyed the work of Jesus, upset his garden for a time, poisoned the deeds of honest Christianity for many generations, and undermined the work of God. No matter through what channel it flows, the poison of anti-Semitism which they give out stems from but a single source, the same source: namely, from the origin of all corruption and pollution, the anti-Christ.
      "By their fruits ye shall know them... Not everyone that saith to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in thy name, and by thy name cast out devils, and by thy name do many mighty works’? And then I will profess unto them, I never knew you; depart from me, ye that work iniquity."
      About whom were these words of Jesus spoken?
      In every country, for hundreds of years, they broke into synagogues and Jewish seminaries of learning. They dragged out books and dumped them into blazing bonfires and autos-da-fe. They ripped out pages, sometimes whole sections of the Holy Scriptures.. Very seldom has a Hebrew book come down to us from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which is not disfigured by the blood-red blots of the censorship. Jews bewailed in lamentations and took more to heart the martyrdom of a Jewish book than of a living Jew. With whom, do you think, was the redeemer and savior to be found when they burned those writings which, according to yourselves, bear witness to his coming?
      That is how the bloody thread drawn by the anti-Christ through the whole length of Christian history reached into our own time, too. Why go back to the Middle Ages and to the Inquisition? What was the state of Christian morality a day before Hitler set the world aflame?
      With whom was he to be found, who had said, "Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness sake?" On which side, do you think, is the "son of God" and on which the son of Satan--the anti-Christ?

      More than a thousand years have passed since the German people accepted Christianity and turned to the one living God and his Messiah.
      But anti-Semitism has, little by little, eaten away at the roots by which you are planted in Gods earth, the roots through which flow the commandments, the blessings, the moral qualities of Jesus of Nazareth. In place of the blood of the son of God, anti-Semitism has injected into your veins the blood of the son of Satan, anti-Christ. Anti-Semitism has poisoned the seed, has undermined the tree--and just see the fruit which it has begun to give forth.
      Hitler has spun a poisoned web of hatred and envy for you and involved you along with himself Lie is the apostle of the anti-Christ, driving along the same furrow which his master has made in your souls. He got you into his power, and you became accomplices to human misery. You witnessed the destroyer as he arose to eradicate a whole people from the earth. It lay in your power to stop him, and yet you were silent. You saw how the destroyer lit fires upon Jewish business firms and dwellings, and you did not quench the flames--they spread across the national boundaries and ignited your own homes.
      You tasted the bread you had helped to sow. Your eyes grew blind with the blindness of hatred, your ears were stopped with the noise of murder and violence. That is why you showed such tolerance towards the deeds of shame that Hitler carried on against the Jewish people. You might have crushed the reptile when it made its first poisonous lunge. Instead of that, you fed the viper at your breast until it was strong enough to throw itself at your neck.
      And now we stand in the very midst of the bath of blood which men have made upon each other. All of our talents, all of our skills, all of our thoughts and of our genius are expended upon one thing only--the destruction and uprooting of human lives. The wings of Death’s angel throw their shadow upon every house. We stand bewildered and amazed in the forest, where man used to be a wild beast.
      There is nothing left of us but a single spark of a belief in God, smoldering in the heap of ashes, the ashes left by the conflagration of our spiritual estates.
      Keep the flame of faith burning in your hearts, spread it, purify it--it can lead you out, you and ourselves, from the darkness and the night.

      Forgive me, Christian, for the sharp-edged words which have fallen from my pen like drops of blood. Forgive me, Christian, that I, a stranger, a mere outsider, take the liberty of disturbing and awakening the Christian conscience within you. It is the reverence which I have for your faith, it is the love, the devotion, and the faithfulness which I feel toward the founder of your religion; it is my belief, my deep faith in the eternal, truthful religious and ethical values of the Judaeo-Christian ideal, which give me the courage and--I may permit myself to say also--the right to assume toward you the attitude of one brother talking to another.
      It is the greatest mistake to believe that the messianic mystery had a small influence upon the Jewish faith. In spite of the rationalists who untiringly did their best to take from the Jewish religion its crown, to cut the wings from the divine idea, and to make it fit into the Procrustean bed of the Aristotelian universe, the messianic idea overcame every stumbling block which was placed in its path.
      Maimonides’ rationalistic conception of the Messiah, a conception kept strictly within the framework of the natural order of things, did not gain much favor. With all due respect to the authority of Maimonides, the religious teachers rejected it, and some of them even decried it as atheism and fought against it bitterly. The Jewish people, for whom the messianic ideal became the sole recompense for its faith in God, did not wish to allow its Messiah to be divested of the divine and kingly robe which the prophets had woven for him. The Messiah was not only the heavenly personage whom the prophet Daniel had visioned coming with the clouds of the sky, but he was even endowed with the crown of martyrdom. The Messiah constructed by Maimonides and later rationalists of the reform epoch could not satisfy the Jewish masses thirst for faith in salvation. The people expected a Messiah who would come upon the clouds of the sky and be accompanied by the hosts of heaven. Such a Messiah seemed reasonable to them and far more natural than the Messiah whom Maimonides draws--a Messiah who will accomplish his great mission by quite ordinary means and in accordance with the laws of nature. The natural path of the Messiah in the concept of Maimonides is more fantastically unreal than the divine road of the Messiah of Chassidism.
      Even Maimonides himself made the messianic ideal and the whole mystery of messianism--the resurrection of the dead--one of the chief dogmas of the Jewish faith. And similarly, too, must the reformed rabbis correct the mistake of the rationalistic founder of "Reformed Judaism." Whoever was raised in the pure spirit of Judaism knows the meaning and place which the messianic mysteries occupy in his religious life. The writer was brought up in a faith which made the Messiah the answer to all hopes and expectations and desires not only for a more just and better world but for a whole new arrangement of the world--an arrangement not based upon laws of an earthly nature but upon the laws of a higher nature, of a divine nature, which knows no limits, an arrangement of the world where the visions of the prophets, of Isaiah, and Ezekiel, become living realities.
      The wealthy, educated Jew, perhaps, did not have to look forward to the messianic re-arrangement of the world; he was able to find comforts enough in the existing order and made it, naturally, the point of departure for the messianic world; he could easily subtract a vast amount from the messianic ideal and make it fit into the rationalistic, liberal age. The poor Jew, on the other hand, could not have survived a day, with the deprivations and worries which chased after him like wolves, except for his belief in the Messiah as a means of escape, a reward for all his sufferings, all the wrongs and persecutions loaded upon him by an unjust world. The Messiah for him is the one who will answer every question and will straighten out everything which is now awry.
      The religious Jew waits every minute of the day for the coming of the Messiah, as the religious Christian awaits the Second Coming--not for a righteous ruler who will install a just order in the world, or a "liberal" order, but for a mysterious personage, half-God, half-man, who was with God before He created the world; a personage who will have the power to change not only our own nature but the nature of the animals as well--the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and a child will play together with both of them; a mysterious personage who will fulfill the vision of Ezekiel--the graves will open and the earth shall give up the dead; there will take place the resurrection of the dead, for which every religious Jew says prayers three times every day.
      Only for such a Messiah was it worth while to have passed through all sorrows and to spin out the thread of Israel’s existence, which began to be woven in the hands of Abraham and has extended down to our own time. Rob the Jews of the messianic mystery and they must fall apart, as have so many other faiths which were built upon the sandy foundations of rationalism.
      It is my firm conviction that the majority of the millions of Polish Jews whom Hitler threw into his fiery ovens while they were still alive--as they were dragging themselves to the ovens with their last ounces of strength, led by their rabbis--that these Jews saw the Messiah during their last moments as he reached out his hands to them from the tongues of flame and received their souls with mercy and pity. The messianic ideal with all of the mysteries which surround it--the resurrection of the dead, the beginning of an absolutely just arrangement of the world--remained the final hope which they took with them from the horrible, wicked world in which they found themselves to that other, better world into which they entered across the thresholds of the lime kilns Hitler had prepared for them.
      I cannot see with what moral powers the remnant of Israel will begin anew its life upon an earth which has split open and swallowed the greatest number of them, if it is not to be with the strength of the hope which is given by the messianic idea.
      And why the Jews alone?
      The whole world finds itself more or less in the same situation as Israel--if not in a physical then in a spiritual sense.
      It is not merely Hitler and his Nazis who are to be blamed for what took place in Germany; we are all accomplices in the German wickedness. The moral status of our generation between the wars had created the atmosphere that made the misdeeds of Germany possible. If a human being can descend to the point of skinning another human being with the purpose of making a lamp shade of the skin, what will stay him from using the stripped corpse for nourishment? The whole human race had fallen from its God-chosen heights to the state of a beast.
      But who are those who will build the new world? What is their moral position? What powers will be working within them? From what source will they gather the moral strength which must surge up within the people if our new society is to be built upon the foundation of a more equitable arrangement of the world?
      It cannot be claimed that they will draw these moral powers from the events of the war or from the state of the world before the war, from the moral condition which made it possible to bring mankind to the brink of the greatest catastrophe and the greatest danger to the existence of our established morality.
      We often hear talk that the war puts Christian morality in danger and that we stand at the end of the Christian epoch.
      Yes, I believe this too--that is to say, I believe it if our enemies, both those within and those without, should, may God forbid it, retain their satanic beliefs after the war. . . if the forces of darkness emerge uncowed from the struggle, or smuggle themselves into our society and become an important factor after they have been vanquished on the field of battle. They have wiped out the teachings, the morality, and the mystery of Christianity. They have put it to shame and laughed at it and labeled it an Asiatic weakness; on the other hand, in their own philosophy they have made cardinal principles of everything that Jesus and his apostles rejected and overcame. Instead of Christian pity, mercy, and love, which Jesus inculcated, the leading themes of their outlook became pagan cruelty, the power of the naked fist, and the strength of force that was purely physical. Particularly have the “Christians” among them sinned a thousand times more grievously and made themselves a thousandfold greater danger to the existence of the Christian religion than the idol-worshipping Nazi fascists.
      We know exactly where we stand with the pagan fascists of Hitler's school. They engaged in open war against us--as we did against them. The lines are sharply drawn. But what is to be done with a type of fascism which utilizes the sacred personage of the founder of the Christian religion as a weapon to bring torture and anguish upon innocent people, to implant enmity and race hatred in the hearts of its followers?
      And our Semitic brethren in Palestine--how have they behaved towards us? When Rommel together with his barbarous hordes of Nazis stood at the gates of Alexandria and the danger was great that they might soil the Holy Land with their unclean fingers, the Arabs in Palestine came out of their burrows and openly began to sharpen their knives in preparation for the cutting of Jewish throats as soon as the Germans should have crossed the borders. They parceled out Jewish lands among themselves ahead of time--those lands which had been recovered by the Jews with the expenditure of so much sweat and toil, and which an Arab representative in Berlin, according to the terms of an agreement with Hitler, was to get in return for Arab aid to the Nazis. Impudently these Arabs appeared in Jewish settlements and marked with chalk the houses, stalls, gardens, and factories which they had betimes distributed among themselves.

      They frankly sharpened their knives for Jewish throats, and as a reward for their loyal attitude to the enemy who was knocking on the doors of the Holy Land, Bible-loving and Christian England presented them with the gift of the "White Paper". With stiff-necked British consistency, the Minister of Colonies in the Palestine administration allowed ships to sink that were carrying hundreds of human lives. After stormy experiences on the sea and after saving themselves from a thousand dangers, Jewish refugees finally reached the shores of Palestine. But the borders were sealed with seven seals against those who had fled before death and annihilation. Bible-loving and Christian England has reserved Palestine, the land that has produced the highest moral good for humanity, the Jewish-Christian ideal, for the Mohammedan faith.
      It is my profound belief that only the Jewish-Christian idea contains in itself the possibility of salvation for our tortured world. The substantial fact that both you and we believe in the same God of Israel, that both of us have taken upon ourselves the yoke of heaven, that we believe in salvation, in redemption, in the promise. that we await the redeemer, the Messiah, each day, each hour, and each minute, that we expect him to come with the clouds of the sky, that we believe the world cannot become perfect without the redeemer--all this has given us, it might be said, a common faith, a common psychology, and common character traits. Our hope for a life after death has made us partners in a moral possession which is the sole consolation of our life; the expectation of the Messiah is our only reward. All of this together has created our civilization, which is founded upon the common elements of the Jewish-Christian idea.
      The messianic faith is based on the conception that our order of things, our world, is not perfect and waits for a savior to redeem it. This conception has created in the souls of the believers in a Messiah a seeking, a longing, a sense of expectation which has given them a tragic quality and an everlasting restlessness. This characteristic is common only to believers in a messianic religion and is contrary to the conception of an aesthetic order such as Buddhism or Mohammedanism.
      This searching after salvation, the hopeful expectation of a Redeemer, has created the prophets, the Psalms, the Epistles of Paul, the ethics and teachings of the rabbis, and of St. Augustine and St. Francis, the moving prayers of the hebrew prayer book, the hymns of the Christian churches, and the different creeds of Christianity. In fact, the evolution of all our cultural achievement was inspired by the belief in the Messiah. The dynamic force of our faith is responsible for the dynamic force of our civilization.
      Judaism in one form or another has come to rule the world because it contained within itself the potentiality of a world ideal imparted to it by divine inspiration. In this civilization, we Jews have an equal part. We are partners to it because it grew out of the foundation we laid, and its pure nature is the nature of the Jews; its virtues are those which our Bible, our prophets, and our Psalms have set as an example. Its highest ethical strivings were created through the messianic ideal.
      It took us a long time to recognize this, to understand it clearly. The smoke from the auto-da-fe which the Inquisition lighted hid the truth from us with a veil. Rivers of blood placed barriers between us; but in the new sun which America created in the sky of faith, we saw the light. Our readiness for mutual recognition, the love and respect which we have for each other, are beginning to cover the bloody abyss that has separated us.
      When Hitler came to power, he tried with all his might to uproot this nature from mankind and to implant a different one instead--the nature of the old beast-man. lie accomplished this in his own country, among his own people, by raising a whole generation of Germans in his spirit, lie forced upon the German the skin of an animal in the forest, he tore up by the root all the blessings and the whole great sum of spiritual values which faith in the Jewish-Christian ideal had created in the soul of European man, and instilled into him the instincts of a beast by forced upbringing, by agitation and propaganda, and by awakening within him the lust to pillage, steal, and murder. He spread his influence over many peoples, scattered his idols over many lands, sowed the seed of evil in many hearts, until the evil matured and he was able to cut the full harvest of the seeds he had planted. The result was the catastrophe which he brought upon us, the fire which he turned against our homes, our cities, our countries, our whole world.
      I can see no hope for our unhappy world save that which lies in the renewal of the moral and spiritual estates which our common ideal of faith has created--in our strengthening hold upon those possessions and in our turning to them with hearts full of faith, in fear of God, in love for Him, and in love for his creation--man.
      That is the road for our tortured world. That is the reward which we can hold out for our children for their efforts, when they return, bloody, from the long night of fear and anxiety. It is the hope we can give those who have paid the highest price in the war. It is the means of rescue we can throw to our enemy, not to slay the sinner but to slay sin itself
      We must all together help each other in finding the way back to God. The world is becoming more shrunken each day with the development of new means of communication. We are all inhabitants of the same world, and the world must belong to God or to the devil. No division of authority exists any longer, because we all share in a single fate.
      America, which is the healthiest country in a sick world, must take upon itself the mission of renewing the hopes of mankind--America, which was established with the purpose that she might understand all men. It is upon America, young and strong in her faith, that the mission has been placed of renewing the Jewish-Christian ideal as the only means of salvation for a world in flames. And that is the gift America will bring to the faith in God.
      In our own time humanity has been brought to the level of the beasts. The dignity of the human being, that sacred position bestowed upon him by the Judaeo-Christian religion, can be restored only by acceptance and submission to its teachings.

      Editor’s Note: The following biography appears on the dust jacket of a book entitled: The War Goes On, published in English in 1936 b G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

      "Sholem Asch was born at Koutno, near Warsaw, on November 1, 1880. He began to earn his own living when he was 16 years old. He had already determined to write, and four years later his first writings were published in two Warsaw journals. These were followed by a series of Jewish studies, and two year later he published a book of stories, The Little Town, which caused him to be placed among the foremost Jewish writers and was translated into many languages. In 1904 his first play, With the Stream, was written, and a one-act play, The Liar; was a great success at the municipal theatre of Cracow. The following year another play, The Temples of the Messiah, was successful both in Russia and Poland.
      "Sholem Asch went to Switzerland, and there wrote the play, God of Vengeance, which was produced by Max Reinhardt and has since appeared all over Europe and in America. He visited Palestine and wrote a tragedy of a false Messiah, Saba Tat Zwi.
      In 1910 he came to New York for six months and wrote a comedy, The Compatriot, before returning to Paris, where he wrote his first novel Mary. He remained in Paris until the outbreak of the war, and wrote, among other things, Our Faith and Mottke the Thief.
      In 1914 he returned to New York, where he remained until 1925, and wrote a number of plays and several novels of Jewish-American life, notably Uncle Moses, The Electric Chair, The Mother and The Return of Lederer.
In 1925 he returned to Europe and settled with his family in the outskirts of Paris, and it is there that he wrote the great trilogy, Three Cities.
      "Asch now lives in Nice, where he wrote Salvation and The War Goes On."

      Editor’s Note: All of Asch’s writings were composed in Yiddish and had to be translated into English. His best selling works in English were his ‘Christological’ novels; The Nazarene (1939), The Apostle (1943) and Mary (1949). Other novels with a religious theme included Moses (1951) and The Prophet (1955).
      Asch became a naturalized citizen of the United States but lived in Israel after 1954. He died on July 10, 1957.

Back

Next