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HIS article is Chapter 1, from Sholem
Asch’s book, ONE DESTINY, written in 1945, in
the aftermath of the Holocaust of World War II. Although it was written more
than half a century ago, his words speak just as clearly to our hearts as if
they were written yesterday. Randolph Parrish, of David’s Quiver
Press, 6813 E Loma Land,
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n the young
manhood of our people, when it was imbued with lusty shepherd strength, our
fathers, rocking in the humps of their camels across the desert, saw the stars
in the sky. The stars became transparent windows, and they saw the Almighty of
all the universe, and they fell on their faces before
Him, stretched out their hands and cried, “Thou art our God!”
From that time on, my
people holds fast to the vision of one living God over all the worlds and over
the whole of humanity, Who alone is worthy of being praised, and sanctified,
Who alone is capable of giving
salvation. The vision of an omnipotent God for all people was steadily before
Abraham’s eyes from the beginning. The Jewish faith did not develop from a
family to a tribal one, from a tribal to a world faith, but had pretended from
its earliest beginnings to be the only and all-encompassing one. That is why
the Jewish God is such a jealous God. He does not tolerate and will not admit
any other deities besides Himself. He is the One and Only, the Sole-Existing,
and everything else is idolatry, impurity, and vice.
A
little less than two thousand years ago, there came into our world among the
Jewish people and to it a personage who gave substance to the illusion
perceived by our fathers in their dream. Just as water fills up the hollowness
of the ocean, so did he fill the empty world with the spirit of the one living God. No one before him and no one after him has bound our
world with fetters of law, of justice, and of love, and brought it to the feet
of the one living Almighty God as effectively as did this personage who came to
an Israelite house in Nazareth in Galilee--and this he did, not by the might of
the sword, of fire and steel, like the lawgivers of other nations, but by the
power of his mighty spirit and of his teachings. He, as no one else before him,
raised our world from “the void and nothingness” in which it kept losing its
way and bound it with strong ties of faith to the known goal, the predetermined
commandment of an almighty throne so as to become a part of the great,
complete, everlasting scheme of things.
He, as no other, raised
man from his dumb, blind, and senseless existence, gave him a goal and a
purpose and made him part of the divine. He, as no other, works in the human
consciousness like a second, higher nature and leaves man no rest in his animal
state, wakens him, calls him, raises him, and inspires him to the noblest deeds
and sacrifices. He, as no other, stands before our eyes as an example and a
warning, and demands of us, harries us, prods us to follow his example and
carry out his teachings. Through his heroic life, he casts us down like dust
before his feet. No one but he sheds about himself such an aura of moral power,
which has molded our world and our character; and no one’s strength but his own
has reached into our time, being the most potent influence in our everyday
lives, inspiring us to goodness and exalted things, being the measure and scale
for our deeds at every hour and minute.
Many of us who, for one
reason or another, are unable to believe in--or whose religious nature cannot
conceive of--the physical resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth on the third day
after his crucifixion, must nevertheless admit, that in a moral and spiritual
sense the Nazarene rises from the dead every day, every hour, and every minute
in the hearts of millions of his believers.
If Jesus was not
actually restored to life three days after his burial, then he was resurrected
every day, every hour, and every minute in the first three hundred years after
his death. What must remain an eternal mystery to those who are blind and deaf
enough not to believe in miracles is the spread of Christianity during the
first three hundred years. There was not enough reason for the pagan world to
violate its own nature and to stifle its Zeitgeist with what was--for it--so
foreign, so unrecognizable, so antagonistic, so Asiatic a faith. If the
Nazarene was revolutionary in blazing a new path for the Jewish spirit, then
his teachings, his essence, were not only incomprehensible to the Greco-Roman
spirit but were the opposite of everything which it considered to be the
mission and the purpose of humankind.
If the pagan peoples
suffered from the need of a change in religion, they could have found enough
material for it within their own spiritual realm. It was possible, within the
framework of their own customs, thoughts, and conduct to work out a religious
ethic through the teachings of the Neo-Platonists and the Stoics. And surely it
is childish and naive to explain the phenomenon by the fact that the apostles
of the new faith made its acceptance easier for the pagans through making
compromise with the old Jewish law. In the face of the danger in which the
pagan placed his very existence, what effect could it have had if he imbibed
the new believe with milk, as the apostle expresses it, or with vinegar? What
attraction could the compromise with Jewish law have had for him when
acceptance of the belief--with or without compromises--made the newly converted
Christian a candidate for the distinction of being thrown to the beasts in the
arena?
I, as a Jew, whose
every move is bound up with the God of Israel, want to know nothing of any
historical wonder, of any faith, save only the wonder and the faith which
radiate from the God of Israel. The wonder is revealed to me in two ways:
first, the miracle of the preservation of
The preservation of
Whoever works, strives,
and desires that this may come to pass is on the side of God. Whoever does
otherwise belongs to the other party. This is my
spiritual credo. On this foundation I have built my house. For this I have
sacrificed everything. With it I stand and with it I fall.
That is why, as a Jew, as an
“outsider,” I claim the right to call you my brothers, believers in the
Messiah, and, as brothers, to talk with you openly and freely. As children who
have the same parents, children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Christians, Jews,
believers in the Messiah, give me your attention, because a brother speaks to
you in the name of millions of your brothers.