he has
learned responsibility to a Supreme Being and love for his neighbor,
in which are embraced the law and the prophets. From the other he has
gathered the promise of Eden, to have dominion over the earth in which
he lives."
Now let me add to this that whatever the Jew claims or possesses of
culture he has borrowed from the nations and civilizations around him,
whether it be architecture, the art or the mode of writing, philosophy
and science, the modes of social and industrial life, all of which he
has taken and assimilated into his own life.
Not so with his religious truth. This is all his own, his peculiar and
genuine contribution to humanity. Thereby he has given human life its
eternal value, its purpose, its goal and hope for all time.
Now it seems to me that you may as well expect of the blind to depict
for you his impressions of the prismatic glories of the rainbow, or of
the deaf to orate on the beauties of a Beethoven symphony, as to
expect of one who lacks the sense of religion, the spirit of faith, to
expound, or even to understand, the ideals of the Jew, whose history
throughout the past was but one continuous glorification of the only
one God, by the master works of its hundreds and thousands of men of
learning and the unparalleled martyrdom of the whole people, and whose
future is humanity made one by the belief in the only one God and
Father. Therefore, let me give you, delegates and members of the
Intercollegiate Menorah Association, the advice to continue as you
started, as an academic, cosmopolitan association, yet at the same
time let it be linked to the synagogue of each city as the center of
the faith. Let your watch-word be true to the symbol of [Hebrew: kumi
uri] "arise and shine," and give light to all the nations. Let your
inspiration and your power of enlightening the world ever come fresh
from the sanctuary of faith, as of yore, and you will not only be all
the more honored for this loyalty to the spirit of the past and the
spirit of the American people which is religious, but the sweetest
delight that comes from the classic world of beauty will reflect only
the brighter light of the holiness, the beauty of holiness, that comes
from Israel's one God.
PROF. I. LEO SHARFMAN
We want all that is worthy in the Jewish past to be made a potent
force in the American life of the present. You men and women who are
students at our universities cannot perform your full duty to your
unive
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