Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/274

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

EMIL G. HIBSCH 255 anew to their daily tasks. The entire world is to become holy, is his message. Dr. Hirsch expounds Judaism, not as a bundle of laws, but as an attitude towards life, a way of living a clean, simple, Dseful life of service and mutual helpfulness. The Jew, being obligated by his Jewish birth to fulfill his duty of social service of love, justice, and righteousness to all his fellows, could not shirk that duty without backsliding. His ceremonialism is the medium through which he expresses his spiritual truths, in ful- filling which he is to achieve his reward on this earth. That Judaism did not come to its completion with the birth of Jesus and the rise of Christianity is one of the points Dr. Uirsch ever impresses on his non-Jewish hearers. Again and again in the columns of the Reform Advocate he has exposed the conceit of prelate and priest in Catholic, Protestant, and even liberal religions, and has showed that Judaism has not suffered an arrested development since the advent of Jesus, but is constantly evolving into higher and more spiritual states. Dr. Hirsch also has positive views on Jesus. Jesus is ac- cepted as the ripest flower of his generation. In him culmi- nated the revolt against ceremonialism and priestly arrogance and political oppression and monopoly. Dr. Hirsch reveres the courage, the eloquence, the martyrdom of Jesus, ranks him among the prophets of Israel, dowered with the inspira- tion of an Isaiah, and the moral earnestness of an Amos : fear- less as Elijah and heroic as Nathan. In him flowed the genius of the Jew, who, amid the thunder of Sinai, proclaimed the

    • thon shalts** and the **thou shalt nots*' to humanity. Jesus

summarized the spiritual and ethical laws of the Judaism of his day, and restated in a popular form the truths that every rabbi knew. The Lord *s Prayer is a Jewish collect, a string of pearls gathered from the jewelled casket of IsraePs pray- ers and aspirations. The courage of the man Jesus, the Galilean carpenter, whose burning zeal fired him with the courage to cleanse the temple of the money changers, appeals to the innate manliness