Discipline
clubs, all impress us alike with their triviality. We do not understand it.
Perhaps you will reply that this contempt is merely rationalization. We despise discipline because we lack it and secretly we aspire to acquire it. But in fact it is the most severely disciplined Jew who most heartily despises your disciplines. It is the modernized Jew, who has thrown off the discipline of orthodox Judaism, who comes nearest your spirit. It is the orthodox Jew, the most Jewish Jew, who least understands you.
And it is this orthodox Jew, this ghetto Jew, whose apparent individualism deprives his mass life of all form and discipline, it is this orthodox Jew who seems, of all Jews, to be least accessible to your orderliness, it is this orthodox Jew who nevertheless submits to an amazing discipline unknown to most of you. I have said that the obstinate maintenance of our identity and our religion through eighty generations of oppression bespeaks a rigorous and effective discipline. But what that discipline is in practice you do not real-
117
