Is our prayerbook for the Day of Atonement, the Mahzor of Yom Kippur, a chance compilation of orisons? Or may we trace some intuitive design—however unobtrusive—in the order and structure of this remarkable set of devotional pieces? I wish to limit my own discussion of this question to a brief analysis of the Ashkenazic Mahzor as used, with minor variations, in Europe and America. I thus exclude other, different collections of Yom Kippur prayers, and I do not offer my views as dogmatically binding in any way, but merely as an attempt to discover some possible new meaning for us today in the Yom Kippur service.
Our post-Biblical literature is filled with “non-canonized” interpretations of ancient religious texts. In offering its own interpretation, the Zohar assures us that at least seventy different comments are possible on the Torah—a modest understatement, perhaps, when we consider the thousands of richly variegated commentaries on the Old Testament written by Jews and non-Jews alike. Why should we hesitate, then, to ponder on the meaning that our great religious documents may have for us today? Why should we narrow Jewish studies down to mere historical research, to questions of the origin of our literature? There is no reason why this or any other “scientific” critical approach need be the only legitimate one.
The German Protestant theologian Franz Delitzsch (father of Friedrich Delitzsch, the highly controversial Oriental scholar and author of Babel und Bibel) once called Yom Kippur the “Good Friday of Judaism.” An upright student, lover and defender of our post-Biblical literature, Franz Delitzsch thought to pay us homage by this comparison of the Day of Atonement with the most solemn festival of Christendom; yet it must be said that the attempt at such a parallel is most misleading. Everything in the Yom Kippur liturgy breathes the spirit of the Old Testament; everything in the Good Friday ritual, the spirit of the Gospels and the Apostle Paul. We certainly must not blindly subscribe to Nietzsche’s scornful characterization of the New Testament as exhaling an odor of the petty soul of a beadsman and his charge that it was a “sin against the spirit” to have bound together the Christian gospels with the Old Testament, that book of giant minds and passions. Yet to minimize the deep-seated differences in ethical and religious attitudes between the two books is equally impermissible.
Primarily, and this is to be seen most clearly in the Yom Kippur liturgy, the main strain of Jewish tradition has never admitted the belief in any mediator between man and his God. Paul placed in the center of Christian feeling the gospel that Jesus, the mediator, the God-man, died the most painful death on the cross to free all who believe in him from sin and condemnation. Judaism insists that man can free himself from the sense of guilt and from transgression only through direct confession to his God, and by the endeavor to “return” from his evil ways to the original state of innocence of the human soul. For, according to basic Jewish conviction, there is no original sin in the sense of man’s inborn moral corruption.
The term Teshubah, Which dominates all prayers for Yam Kippur, signifies penitence—or repentance only in a derivative sense; originally, it means simply “return,” the going back to a point of departure. And this return is man’s self-emancipation from his misdeeds through the start of a new and better way of life. “Hail, Israel, before whom dost thou purify thyself and who cleanses thee from sin? Thy Father in Heaven” (Yoma 85b). “Revert, revert from thy evil doings, House of Israel: why dost thou want to die? I, the Lord, do not delight in the death of the sinner but in his return from his misdeeds. Then I will put a new spirit within thee and will take the stony heart out of thee to give thee a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 11:19; 18:30ff). These words by Rabbi Akiba and the prophet Ezekiel, especially the words of the prophet, which are repeated eight times during the day, are the great leitmotifs of the Yom Kippur service.
But, wisely, the liturgy by no means contains only prayers, supplications, calls for contrition and moral betterment. In the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the day, there are, remarkably, no prayers in the proper sense of the word. The most characteristic part, one may well say, the high point of the Shaharith, the morning service, consists of magnificent hymns which concentrate on a passionate glorification of the greatness of God and His universe. In the most powerful Biblical and Haggadic similes, in almost blinding images, the worshipper, his mind fresh in the prime of the day, is called upon to look up to the splendor of God’s creation and His might. Again and again, especially in the numerous hymns which start with the call “Ubekhen,” and in the refrains, the Rehitim (ascribed to Kalonymus of Lucca), following the Kedushah (the prayer in praise of holiness), the overwhelming power of the one and only God is solemnized—the God whose throne is high above the clouds, unreachable, the radiant God who wraps Himself in light as in a garment and who has created the most threatening beast of prey, the Leviathan, as a mere plaything for his merriment. He who holds the weight of the world in His arm, before whom the pillars of the heavens tremble and in whose presence even the Seraphim, the highest ranking angels, have to cover their faces, He is the one who draws man from out of the womb. He is sanctified by myriads and feared in the lightning. He presides above the paeans of his adorers and sweeps along the heavens. The supernatural, purest beings, formed out of ice, snow, and flame, greet Him as the sanctified Holy One. “At his breath the mountains are rent, the valleys are cleaved asunder; they melt as wax.” He alone suspends the world on nothingness.
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These dithyrambic effusions prevail especially in the morning service, in the worshipper’s freshness of emotion. Only in contrast to these hymns on the greatness of God is the smallness of man depicted. In comparison with God, man is “naught—vested in shame, clothed in ignominy,” “worm and moth,” “a fleeting whiff,” “a withering leaf,” “a soiled, dusty potsherd on the ground.” Man in himself is mute. He does not even have the power of praying. It is only his Creator who can “open his mouth” and endow him with the gift of praise. And in the Piyyut, the poem “Taawat Nefesh,” ascribed to Meshullam ben Kalonymus, we hear: “How can a mortal be pure and stainless before Thee, for even the hosts of heaven cannot stand clean before Thine eyes? [Compare Job 15:14f]. From his origin and his birth man is unclean, in life as in death. His days are void, his nights emptiness, his afflictions futile, as a dream at the hour of awakening.”
The German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, friend of the philosophers Schelling and Hegel, analyzing the fervor of these “Oriental” ideas on God and man, aptly observed in his novel Hyperion that in the Orient the sky of a fierce luster forces down those who live under it like a despot; before man has learned to walk, he must kneel; before he has learned to talk, he must pray. Thus in one of the Selihot (prayers for forgiveness) in the “Adon Beshaftekha,” during the later hours of the morning service, Elia bar Shemayah repeats the passionate accusation of the prophet Habakkuk (2:11): “The stone out of the wall” and “the beam out of the timber cry out thy crime.” In one of the so-called “Akedot” (poems referring to the sacrifice of Isaac) written by Benjamin ben Serach in the 11th century, Abraham’s merits, his complete submission to the will of God are invoked to assist his offspring; and in a bold mystic sense, Abraham’s sanguinary sacrifice on Mount Moriah is compared to a joyful nuptial feast given by the father for the son.
The most specific moral and social demands of the Day of Atonement, however, are unfolded at the end of the morning service, in the Haftarah, the reading from Isaiah (58:5-8) where, paradoxically, we are informed on the very day of fasting that God has no interest in man’s fasting as such. “Is this a fast such as I would choose,” speaketh the Lord, “a day for a man . . . to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? Wilt thou call this a fast . . . acceptable . . . to the Lord? Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens” of thy fellow man, “and to let the oppressed go free and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? When thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thy healing shall spring forth speedily.”
The Musaf service, Which is an addition to the morning prayers (such supplements exist for the Sabbath and all festivals), follows the Shaharith and the readings from the Torah and Isaiah. This Musaf lasts for several hours in the afternoon and at its beginning seems hardly more than a further unfolding of the most significant themes of the Shaharith. The later prayers are perhaps even heightened in stateliness, solemnity, and ornateness, until a kind of calming finale to these rich adornments of vision and thought is reached in the following plain and stirring eulogy: “Thy hallowed name is near even to those far away. For Thee every heart longs. . . . The world pivots around Thy word. Thy people achieve perfection only through Thee and they call out: The Lord alone is our God! Those who are set as a seal upon Thy heart respond: the Lord is One and only One! Those whom Thou hast saved from their mother’s womb respond: He alone is our God! Those who cling to Thee respond: there is no other God but Thee.”
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But the Musaf service does not exhaust itself simply in the elaboration of the sentiments of the Shaharith. The center of this second chapter of the Yom Kippur Mahzor is occupied by the recital of a completely different kind, the so-called Abodah. The Abodah is neither prayer nor hymn. It is an epic report of the Yom Kippur service in the ancient Palestinian Temple before its destruction by the Romans, in 70 C.E. The term Abodah itself means service. In the Shaharith—as generally in Jewish prayer—the individual worshipper has already identified himself with all the members of the congregation. In the Abodah, the full identification of the contemporary Jew with the past generations of his ancestors reaches back even to the ancient people of Israel. (In a similar vein, and going even further, the Passover Haggadah demands that in every generation each Jew regard himself as if he himself had been freed from the bondage of his ancestors in Egypt.) In the Musaf Abodah of Yom Kippur, the confession of sins once recanted by the High Priest in the Temple at Jerusalem is recited word for word by the Hazan, the reader, and immediately repeated by the congregation present as its own confession.
The lapse of time is thus leaped over, and what was felt and said two thousand years ago is, literally, felt and said again by the Jew of this day. The deep and moving historical consciousness of an inmost continuity of national fate, possessed by many nations, can hardly reach a higher climax than is attained in the Passover Haggadah and in the Abodah of Yarn Kippur. The proceedings of the ancient service in the Temple are narrated in every detail by the reader of the congregation; and at every point, the Jew of our day is supposed to live again through the grandeur, the strange archaisms, the deep, human humility revealed in the Yom Kippur rites of those distant days.
As the Abodah records, in the Temple of Jerusalem the preparations for (the Yom Kippur started seven days before the festival. The High Priest went into seclusion one full week before the Day of Atonement. He was sprinkled with the water of atonement. The sages, the elders of the nation, joined him, asking him to study again the relevant ordinances of the Torah and their meaning. Toward sunset they offered him only a little food and all night young priests prevented him from falling asleep. When the watchman on the watchtower called out: “The dawn rises!” they spread a veil of byssus between the High Priest and the people. He bathed, slipped into his garments of gold, and performed the daily morning sacrifices. Then, on the Day of Atonement itself, the sacrificial bullock was placed between the entrance hall and the altar, its head toward the west . . . and the High Priest approached it, pressed both his hands upon its head, confessed his sins, without self-concealment. And thus he spoke: “Oh [great] Name! I have sinned, have been evil, and have lapsed before Thee, I and my house. By Thy [holy] name forgive the sin, the wickedness and evil by which I have sinned, have been wicked and evil before Thee, I and my house. As is written in the Torah of Moses, Thy servant, out of the mouth of Thy glory; ‘for on this day He will blot out your sins to cleanse you for all your transgression before the Eternal.’” When the priests and the people standing in the court heard the awful and exalted name of the Lord, literally pronounced, coming from the mouth of the High Priest in sanctity and purity, they bent their knees, bowed their heads, and touched the ground with their faces, calling out: “Praise to the name of His glorious Kingdom, from eternity to eternity!”
Only on the Day of Atonement, and only by the High Priest, was the literal pronunciation of the Name of God permitted; on other occasions and, by all other persons, circumlocutions of the Name had to be used; and still today kneeling takes place in the Jewish ritual—if ever—only on Yom Kippur during the Abodah, and during the Aleinu prayer on Rosh Hashanah when kneeling is mentioned in the text of the liturgy. Three times the Tetragrammaton was pronounced by the High Priest in Jerusalem, in three confessions of enhanced intensity, first on behalf of the High Priest himself and his house, then for him, his house, and all the sons of Aaron, the first High Priest in Moses’ time, and finally for the whole house of Israel—the confessions being interrupted by the rhythmic sprinkling and solemn counting of the sprinkling over the altar, over the cover of the Ark, and over the sacred curtain inside the Temple. When, however, the High Priest stepped out of the Holy of Holies, where he had remained hidden from the people, then his appearance was comparable to “the splendor of the morning star rising in the east.” (Compare Leviticus 16; Talmud tractate Yoma; and the Piyyut “Keohel Hanimtah.”)
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Details of the Abodah continue to appear in the Musaf Selihoth later on, but there they are mixed with entreaties for forbearance, and for the salvation of Israel and the restoration of Zion: as is said, for instance, at the beginning in the chain of the Musaf Selihoth: “Our God and God of our fathers, give back Thy glory to Thy devastated mountain seat, reappear, let the aura of Thy temple shine from afar, rebuild its chambers, cleanse them from all defilement, and lead the nations to Thy temple’s light! Oh, guide them back, the lost tribes, call them, gather them by pipe, gather them by drum, bring them home up to Thy house, as has been written by the hand of Thy prophet: ‘for My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples [Isaiah 56:7].’”
Suddenly, however, all this hopeful longing and the dwelling on the memories of an unforgettable past are broken off with the commencing of the Minhah prayers, the late afternoon service. This marks the most trenchant change in tone within the whole liturgy: the transition from the expansive splendor in language and image of the Shaharith and the Musaf Abodah to the dramatically concise, terse, and much briefer Minhah, and then on to the final evening prayers, the Neilah.
Only in the Kedushah of the Minhah Amidah can there be traced a brief aftermath and some resemblance to the Shaharith hymns on the greatness of God’s nature. In sharp contrast to all this, the Minhah reading from the Torah speaks in quite different terms, on a wholly dissimilar subject. The topic is incest (Leviticus 18:7 ff), referring to the most secretive—though comparatively rare—individual guilt of man down the ages. “Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father and mother . . . thy son’s daughter and thy daughter’s daughter . . . thy father’s sister and thy mother’s sister.” Thou shalt not do this so “that the land vomit not ye out . . . When ye defile it.” Thus the liturgy cuts into the darkest unconscious impulses of the individual.
Again, in a totally different way, individual guilt is touched upon in the Minhah Haftarah immediately following the reading of the Torah. At least as far back as the days of the Talmud (see Megillah 31b), the Book of Jonah was suggested as the most suitable for the late afternoon service of Yom Kippur. For, like the worshipper on Yom Kippur, the prophet Jonah had the hazardous intent to flee from God: from Teshubah in himself and from preaching Teshubah to the great city of Nineveh. Even after he has turned the citizens of Nineveh from their depravity, he remains in his habitual sullen temper. He prefers death to a new start in life, to that moral rebirth demanded by Yom Kippur. Only some trivial creature comfort can win him back to a fleeting satisfaction with life. When he wants to die because he has to suffer from the heat during his wandering on his great mission, God speaks to him ironically: Are you so unhappy on account of the heat? and Jonah confesses bluntly that this physical discomfort outweighs any gratification he feels from a great moral achievement. Only when God causes a tree to grow for him in the desert so that he can enjoy its shade, does his mood lift. He falls into dejection once more when the tree withers. Like the average man, like the ordinary run-of-the-mill Jew, Jonah always prefers sensual pleasantness to the fulfillment of a great ethical task. Until finally God asks the reluctant prophet, the man a prophet against his will, that crushing question, filled with inexhaustible symbolic meaning: “Thou hast pity on the kikayon tree for which thou hast not labored, neither madest it to grow, which sprung up as the child of a night and perished as the child of a night. And should I not pity Nineveh, the great city wherein are twelve times ten thousand men who cannot discern between right and left, and countless cattle?”
This, too, is the great question which Yom Kippur unrolls before every Jew: should the decisive spiritual “return” of the individual and of the masses be lost sight of in the yearning after the small passing physical comforts? Should the greatest moral aim be abandoned because of the lethargy and aimlessness of those who wish to escape?
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In utmost contrast to such purposeless drifting, the martyrologies of the Minhah Selihoth point to the examples of the great Jewish martyrs of all times, who preferred the most cruel death to the desertion of their faith. The tortures they endured are enumerated in detail: “Like a doorstep they were stepped on.” Like sacrifices “for the altar they were pushed on . . . the schoolchildren and the elders with their teachers. But they cried: ‘We love our God unto death.’ The flesh was torn from off the living body of Rabbi Akiba by multi-edged irons. . . . Rabbi Teradyon ben Hananya was thrown onto a heap of branches, the branches set afire, and wet wool laid on his heart to prolong his torment. The skin of Rabbi Ismael was slit off and when they reached the place on his forehead where the tefillin are fastened, he cried out in bitterness to the Creator of his soul: ‘Is this the reward of the Torah? Thou who art wrapped in light, can Thy great awesome name be reviled by Thine enemy?’ But a voice from heaven answered: ‘If I hear one more objection, I shall pour out the world like water and reduce the earth back to nothingness. For this is my decree, and those who are engaged in the Law shall accept My judgment.’ Fathers slaughtered, in full submissiveness, their sons, mothers offered up their babes.”
Yet, in the Minhah service, as in the preceding prayers, martyrdom, asceticism, suffering, and contrition are never valued as ends in themselves. The final call always goes out for “the day of love and nearness to thy fellow man, the day of relinquishment of all envy and strife” (as, for example, the prayer “Abal Awonoth” following the Abodah).
In some of the Selihoth written at the time of the worst persecutions of Jews in the Middle Ages, during the Crusades, a thought of vengeance flares up. “O God, be not silent at the shedding of my blood, be not mute toward my adversaries! Demand my blood from the hands of my destroyers, let the earth not cover it up.” Such rather subdued outcry is certainly no less justifiable than Martin Buber’s challenge to a Nazi scholar in 1933, when Buber reminded him that the God who has punished Jews so often will not leave unopened the book in which the guilt of other nations is inscribed.
But high above any wish for vengeance, there shines the longing for the Day of Atonement between all men and nations, the Day of the Messiah, on which “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” These immortal words of Isaiah are repeated in all Tefilloth of the day; and the Musaf service had already added: “Oh, lead all nations to the light of Thy restored Temple!” Perhaps the most moving expression is given to these thoughts in the prayer by Mordecai ben Shabtai: “Lord, at the decline of day, in the haunt of the fall of night, see how Thy people raise their eyes up to Thee and pray as Isaac once prayed in the fields at the close of day. Oh, heal their wounds, sprinkle them at sundown with the waters of cleanliness, wash them, scrub them at eventide. At the close of day, be like dew to Israel, that it open up and flourish like a rose! Look down at their fasting, their starving . . . seal them into the Book of Life! The day declines. The shadows of night fall. Thou Holy One, enthroned above all songs of praise, see how the whole people has been standing before Thee [in fasting] from morning till evening. At evening, morning, and noon we have prayed to Thee. Oh, give us soon a sign of the coming of that day known only to Thee, the day that is not day and not night, the day of the Messiah” (compare Zachariah 14:7, 9).
In this way, everything is prepared for the final crowning of the Day of Atonement, the Neilah, the prayer between day and night. There is no Neilah for any other day of the year—it was created only for Yom Kippur, and of all the sets of prayers of the day, the Neilah is of the greatest simplicity, concentration, and brevity. The Al Het confession, somewhat pedantically enumerating two sins for every letter of the alphabet, is now omitted, while it had been an essential part of the confession of sins, the Viddui, in the Shaharith, Musaf, and Minhah services. The Kedushah of the Neilah is as brief as on every Sabbath of the year and has far less of the glamor of the earlier praises of God’s holiness.
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But throughout the later Minhah and the whole Neilah the intensity of supplication steadily increases. “Lord, let my blood and fat which I have lost through fasting serve you for the fat and blood of the sacrifices [in the Temple of Jerusalem]. Subdue, blot out, our guilt and let it sink into the currents of the sea, into depths where it cannot be remembered, cannot be recalled nor rise again in all eternity!” “Lord, help us; for the waters reach out for our soul!”—“On my back the plowers draw long furrows” (Psalm 129:3). “From sea to sea were we tossed and drifted like storm-driven birds; and nowhere did we find balm for our wounds. . . . Lord, cut the thongs of the yoke off from Thy people’s neck. And you, survivors of Israel, remnants of the tribes, circumcise your stony hearts. . . . ‘Cast ye up, cast ye up, prepare the way, take up the stumblingblock out of the way of my people [Isaiah 57:14].’ Straighten your crooked ways, fashion for yourselves a heart of purity. . . . Lord, remember us for life, King who desires that we live, seal us in the book of life for Thy sake, God of Life!”
In the Neilah we no longer hear the repeated appeals of the day to be inscribed in the book of life. The inscribing, it is now believed, has been completed. At the Neilah, it is the seal of God to His inscriptions which is at stake. Almost all the prayers are now repeated. Exhausted by the long fasting and the uninterrupted service, the reader recites the words slowly and the congregation repeats them slowly, distinctly, and anxiously. AM the angels are supposed to thrust forward to God’s throne. They are asked to plead for us, even though “no angel is pure enough before Thee.” The day turns to dusk; the shadows lengthen: “O open Thy gates to us at the hour of closing! The sun is setting; we come to Thy doors. Lord, forgive us”—and now the calls for forbearance surge up even more—“Lord, pardon us, have mercy on us, exonerate, exculpate, redeem us, condone and spare us, be not stern, harsh, and hard upon us; relent and wipe out our guilt! For not in self-assuredness and not in confidence in the justice of our cause do we put our requests before Thee, but only trusting in Thy great compassion and commiseration. . . . Lord, harken unto us, comply with our entreaty! No longer hesitate, for Thy sake. For by Thy Name is named Thy city and Thy people. See, like the clay in the hand of the potter—to his liking he pulls it, to his liking he compresses it—thus we are in Thy hand, Lord [compare Jeremiah 18]. O look down on Thy covenant with us and not on our evil impulse. . . . Shepherd of Israel, bend down Thine ear from on high, answer us, respond, O Lord! Only on Thee do we lean . . . unto Thee do we cleave . . . let us remain Thine own.”
Then, for the eighth time—starting with the folktune-like verses calming the tensions of the worshippers—the general confession of sin is repeated. “Verily, we are Thy servants, Thou art our master. . . . We are Thy children, Thou art our father. We are Thy flock, Thou art our shepherd. We are Thy vineyard, Thou art our keeper. We are Thy beloved ones, Thou art our lover.” “Our God, and God of our fathers, let our prayer come before Thee and withdraw not from our entreaties! For we are not so arrogant of face and so stiff of neck that we would say before Thee: we have been righteous and we have not sinned; no, truly, we have sinned; we are guilty” (Samson Raphael Hirsch, the renowned Orthodox rabbi of Frankfort on the Main, in a comment about a hundred years ago pointed out that this word “guilt” in Hebrew means “deserving complete devastation of the mind, total loss of happiness”), “we duped and scorned, ridiculed and rebelled, we erred and we deluded others. But Thou art just in all that has come upon us. For Thou hast acted in truth, but we acted in malice. . . . Who are we? What is our life? What is our goodness, what our righteousness and the help we can lend? What is our power? What can we say before Thee?. . . . Are not all the heroes like naught before Thy brow and the men of renown as if they had never lived, and the sages without insight, and the wise men without discernment? For the fullness of their deeds is futility, and the days of their life are chaff and trash before Thee. . . . But today help us, strengthen us!”
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Finally, however, at the end of the ten to twelve hours of continuous service—after the last Abinu Malkenu and its supplications—all requests and prayers stop. At the end of the long sequel of orisons, there follows simply a threefold repetition of the words with which countless Jewish martyrs have stood torture and death: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One! Praised be the name of His glorious kingdom forever.” This confession of faith, thrice made, is fortified by the repetition several times of that call with which the converted nation once turned to the prophet Elijah on Mount Carmel, after he had unveiled before the king of Israel the impotence of all the pagan priests of Baal. Seven times the reader and the congregation call out: “The Lord alone, He alone is God!” No word is spoken after that, the call is followed by a single blast on the shofar, the ancient horn which was used to awaken the people in the desert and afterwards in their homeland to the contemplation of grave national or moral decisions.
To the contemporary Jew, without historical consciousness, the preserving of monotheistic faith may sound like a meaningless truism. In the course of the centuries, however, the opponents of this monotheistic religion have never ceased to fear it as the bulwark of the most radical moral and religious enlightenment. In the ageless struggle against pagan superstition, primitive sensualism, and moral and religious disintegration, monotheism, in truth, was the great standard bearer of an abstract higher intellectual and moral insight. We, therefore, might do well not to forget that we are the heirs of that great religious and moral faith for which our ancestors once paid the highest price, and gave their lives.
Ancient Greece vastly excelled Israel in acuteness of thought, in works of art of a unique harmony and nearness to nature. Rome became politically far superior, by the discipline of its military organization and the efficiency of its jurisprudence and civic administration. But no other nation has ever equaled the vehemence and force, the fervor and depth of the moral and religious life of ancient Judaism.
As for everything in life and history, a price had to be paid for these achievements. Especially in the 17th century, probably the least fertile epoch in Jewish history, the all-embracing, all-penetrating strength and severity of moral and religious feeling led to excesses in rigorism and, unfortunately, to overemphasized ritualism. In Christianity, the great daughter religion of Judaism inspired by Paul, the moral vigor of Jewish thought often led on even to dangerous asceticism, among monks and nuns, to a kind of sick self-hatred and blind self-torture. But the eye of the historian of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and our eye, ought not therefore to be obscured to the greatness of Judaism, and of one of its notable achievements, not, I think, a minor one: the prayerbook of the Day of Atonement.
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