Die Welt

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No. 38. Vienna, 20 September 1901. Fifth Year

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World Zionist Day.

In the joint working of the masses, powers of wonder reveal themselves.

Take six hundred individuals, put them together, set them to work — there will certainly come out more work than the same individuals would have accomplished singly in the same time, but no other kind of work.

Now consider a mass fused together by an instinct or by an enthusiasm. It too is only a sum of individuals. And yet it feels quite otherwise than its members would have felt in isolation; it moves quite otherwise than they would have moved; it accomplishes things of a wholly different kind — one might say, of another world — than they could ever accomplish.

By an instinct or by an enthusiasm. The outward effect, the height of the tension and the quantity of the moving energy may be the same in both cases; soul, meaning and worth will be unspeakably different. Instinct is the raw beginning, the confused and turbid starting-point of the general development; enthusiasm is its summit and its crown. In the fusion through instinct the mass sinks down to the level of its lowest-standing member; in the fusion through enthusiasm it cannot indeed soar up to the highest — for that is forbidden to a mass — but it then embodies nevertheless the fairest elevation of a collective body; it stands there in that great purity which only life for the idea, and in the idea, can bestow. Here, to be sure, one must not think of consciousness; in the movements of the mass there utters itself only the dark, overflowing feeling. Yet precisely in this there springs the source of the deepest and sweetest mysteries of our existence.

I do not believe that it was considerations of this kind which determined certain Zionists here and there to raise and to propagate the thought of a World Zionist Day. In some form, however, something similar may well have occurred to them along with this thought, perhaps only as a mood that flitted softly past; and it is to be hoped that the realisation of the plan will prove that mood right. In the first place, however, they will doubtless have thought of the immediate usefulness of such a day for the movement.

World Zionist Day! The picture that first arises is doubtless that of an immense demonstration, of a demonstration so great that its beauty is wholly untroubled by the pettinesses of every day. One forgets the resistance of time and of space, those niggardly and obstinate powers. In one and the same moment, as it were, the Zionists of all lands will rise up and bear witness for their truth. In one and the same moment, as it were, the air over the whole earth will quiver with Zion-values. Could this hour, or this succession of hours, be consecrated in full purity to the power of our soul and to its utterance; could the deep, subterranean, spellbound will of the people break forth with the might of an elemental force in one great stream and glow through the darkness, the most glorious of promises — then this succession of hours might no longer be called a demonstration; it would have to be called a revelation . . . .

The insufficient will not become event. Where our dreaming ceases, we must content ourselves with the world as it is given. But even then there lies in the thought of a World Zionist Day much that is strong and right.

The eve of the Fifth Congress has been thought of. On that day — or on one near to it — festive assemblies are to be held in all places of the earth. The day dictates the order of business: From the First to the Fifth Congress, or: Four Years of Zionist Activity. Some will say: Why not twenty? Why not forty? I grant that they are right. Yes, on that day it will be impossible to avoid speaking of two thousand years of Zionist activity. All that was good and fruitful within Jewry in these two thousand years was, in the deeper sense, Zionist; for it led to life. Will one now, alongside this, with scrupu-