fore
the coming of the kingdom of the Messiah.(1240)

4. The logical assumption was, accordingly, that only the dead of the holy
land should enjoy the resurrection. The prophetic verses were cited: "I
will set glory in the land of the living,"(1241) and "He that giveth
breath to the people upon it, and spirit to them that walk therein,"(1242)
and were interpreted in the sense that God would restore the breath of
life only to those buried in the holy land.(1243) Likewise the verse of
the Psalmist, "I shall walk before the Lord in the land of the living,"
was referred to Palestine, as the land where the dead shall awaken to a
new life.(1244) Hence the rabbis held the strange belief that when the
great heavenly trumpet is sounded to summon all the tribes of Israel from
the ends of the earth to the holy land,(1245) those who have been buried
outside of Palestine must pass through cavities under the earth, until
they reach the soil where the miracle of the resurrection will be
performed.(1246) It has, therefore, become a custom of the pious among the
Orthodox to this very day, in case they could not bury the dead in
Palestine, to put dust of the holy land beneath their head, that they
might arise wherever they were buried.

5. We may take it for granted that this naive conception of the
resurrection could not be permanent, and so was modified to include a
double resurrection: the first, national, to usher in the Messianic
kingdom, and the other, universal, to usher in the everlasting life of the
future. The former offered scant room for the heathen world, at best only
for those who had actually joined the ranks of Judaism; the latter,
however, included the last judgment for all souls and thus opened the way
for the salvation of the righteous among the nations as well as the people
of Israel. At this point the conception of resurrection led to higher and
more spiritual ideas, as has been shown in Chapter XLIII.

6. However, the belief in the resurrection of the body, though expressed
in the ancient liturgy, is in such utter contradiction to our entire
attitude toward both science and religion, that it may be considered
obsolete for the modern Jew. Orthodoxy, which clings to it in formal
loyalty to tradition, regards it as a miracle which God will perform in
the future, exactly like the many Biblical miracles which defy reason.

7. The Zionist movement has given many Jews a new attitude toward the
national resurrection of I