m is death even as the penalty for
blaspheming God. Ibn Ezra held that, if Israel keep this
commandment,--Honor thy father and thy mother,--it will not be exiled
from the promised land. Exiled it was from the promised land, but
obedience to the fifth Commandment did much to make the life of
Israel despite exile one of the beauty of promise fulfilled.

The grace and glory of the Jewish home were twofold. The selflessness
of parents evoked such filial tenderness and self-forgetfulness as to
bring about the perfect understanding of togetherness. The reverence
of the Jewish child for parents continued even beyond death. The
passing of the visible presence of a parent little lessened and often
greatened the revering love of the Jewish child. This accounts for the
pathos and romance associated with the "Kaddish" chant of the Hebrew
liturgy, forerunner of the Mass, and perhaps in the mind of Jesus when
he bade, Do this in remembrance of Me. This glorification of the
Author of death as well as life, is not to be viewed as a symbol of
ancestor-worship but rather as a sign of the tenderest of human pieties.

What the child was in the Jewish home it became because of what its
parents were toward it. To say that the Jewish mother has been
unsurpassed in the history of men because she dreamed that a child by
her borne might become a Messiah of its people does not quite touch
the roots of the unbelievable tenderness and beauty of maternal
dedication in the Jewish home. Neither is the relation of the Jewish
father and child wholly to be explained by the fact of his involuntary
aloofness from the world and his dependence upon the home for
whatsoever of peace and joy this world could give him. It is not too
much to say that the Messianic ideal of the Jewish mother and the fact
of the Jew's exclusion from the world without may have tended to
deepen and to hallow parental love, but the mystery abides not less
wondrous in some ways than the mystery of Israel's survival.

Certain perils, it might be imagined, were the inevitable
accompaniment of or sequel to this wonderful love and reverence within
the Jewish home,--the peril of repression of the inner life of the
child chiefly and also of the parent. But students of Jewish history
would hardly aver that the intellectual and spiritual nature of the
child was really stifled or stunted by reason of the illimitable
filial reverence. And if at times there was intellectual
self-repression and