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No. 39. Vienna, 28 September 1900. Fourth Year

Once a Year.

By Leo Rafaels.

The Jewish population of the great cities never comes, the whole year through, to raise itself above the interests of the day and of the moment, above personal affairs; amid heavy labour and costly, exacting recreation, everything that does not obtrusively address the senses or tug at our selfishness is utterly forgotten. If a man does once, in the midst of the prose of everyday life, remember his Jewishness, it is commonly a hostile reminder that produces the unwonted stirring. From within, by instinct, elementally, the modern West European Jew turns to his people but once in the year: on the Day of Atonement the otherwise empty temples and prayer-rooms are filled into their remotest corners.

Once, when we were young and expected of life the same rigid consistency which we believed we found in the realm of the mind, we looked down upon the Yom Kippur Jews with unspeakable superiority, and the whole disconsolate distraction of Western Jewry came home to us painfully on that day. Once a year! Involuntarily there came to mind those occasions which occur but once in every year — once a year, on the 9th of Ab, a visit is paid to the dead; once a year a flame-offering is brought to a dear departed soul. Does it not look for all the world as though the visit which the modern city Jew pays to the temple on Yom Kippur were a courtesy, an act of piety rendered by the survivor to the dead — to that dead Jewry which has ended its four-thousand-year-old, ever and exceedingly vigorous existence in Western Europe and awakens only once a year to a spectral semblance of life?

The superior love of mockery has vanished with our youth; the pain has remained. What worthy Jews those were, whose instinct drove them to sit at least once a year in an assembly of their own tribesmen, to let the prayer-book remind them of the common past and to be lulled into the sweet dream that a common future still lay before us! The sons of these Yom Kippur Jews give us no further occasion to mock at inconsistency, for they have entirely overcome the Jewish instinct and are strong-minded enough to suppress manfully whatever remnant of remembrance of that one day may still exist in them.

What do the Yom Kippur Jews think, and what do they feel, when on the Day of Atonement they look upon the empty seats from which their children in their young years gazed devoutly toward the East and bowed their backs before the shadow of the Holy of Holies!

They may have taken into themselves all the enlightenment and wisdom of the world, they may be simple shopkeepers — at the sight of the empty seats it goes through the heart of every one of them like a sword. This feeling of the old men is not easily smiled away, nor superficially explained. After long schooling we have grown very tolerant in matters of religion and politics; we do not break off intercourse with our friends because they vote otherwise than we do, and we leave every man free to make what he can of the riddle of the world. Jewish fathers in particular have an inexhaustible measure of tolerance toward their children. Only on Yom Kippur does the feeling rear up, in physicians and advocates, in philosophers and engineers, against the sons who neglect to remember their Jewishness at least once in the year.

Is this a remnant of old habit, an atavistic spectre that masters even the most enlightened of our people on Yom Kippur?

Ah, no! The tolerance of Jewish fathers is very, very great, but somewhere it must find its limit, just as the most abstinent self-tormentor must somewhere come up against the resistance of nature. The fasting penitent reaches, for food and drink, when he stands before annihilation, and the West European Jew trembles on Yom Kippur in his deepest soul, because in the empty seats he sees the death that threatens his race. It does not become clear to all these fathers why they, who in truth are not believers and who hang together with Jewry only very loosely, at the indifference of their sons so burning a