ational past and in the dreams of a
national future. So far as the present was concerned, we were perforce
interested only in the maintenance of our identity and in the
preservation of our ancient law, so that we might be in a position
some day to realize our dreams and to reestablish our national state,
founded on this ancient law. Deprived as we were of all right to live
in the present, we could justify our existence and continuance as a
separate people and a separate religion only by laying stress on the
importance of our ancient law, and striving to hand it down, pure and
unaltered, to future generations. Therefore in those days the rabbis
were naturally our only leaders, and their right to leadership
depended solely upon their knowledge of the law. The observance of the
Torah embraced all the limits of the life of the Jew.

_New Opportunities and New Obligations_

TO-DAY all this has changed. The Jew of to-day is living in the
present, and the observance of the minutiae of Jewish law is to the man
active in civic and business life of slight if any importance.

Inconceivable as it would be to a medieval Jew that at a conference of
Jewish rabbis a layman should preside and laymen should make formal
addresses, it would be equally inconceivable to such a Jew that among
the laymen who might make such addresses, there could be a professor
at a great university, a worker in the general social activities of
the city, and a judge. These changed conditions, this wide life now
opened to the Jews, have produced new problems, and we demand of our
rabbis, if they are indeed to remain the teachers and leaders in
Israel, that they help us solve these problems.

As soon as opportunities were offered to us, we eagerly grasped them.
We are too eager, too ambitious, too practical a people to continue to
live in dreams of the past and visions of the future, when the present
is thrown open to us. We have definitely and forever discarded the
concept that we are a peculiar people, the "chosen of the Lord," in so
far as that concept cuts us off from free participation in the life of
the nations among which we live, or from serving in the cause of the
general advance of humanity. We have demanded the opportunity to
exercise civic rights, and as those rights have been granted, we have
recognized that the opportunity confers also an obligation--the
obligation to exercise those rights in no narrow spirit, but for the
benefit of the whole