Die Welt

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No. 16. | Vienna, 18 April 1902. | 6th Year

With this number is enclosed a musical supplement: a song by Jehuda ben Halevy, which our esteemed master Brüll has most graciously set to music expressly for "Die Welt."

Passover.

By Arthur Schwarz (Vienna).

To understand the festivals of a people is to understand that people itself in its innermost depths. Judaism is embittered and scourged down by a thousand disappointments; it is borne up by faith in a single fulfilment. Upon the festive hours of our "good days" there lies the same veil of tears as lies upon the eyes of our women and upon the deeds of our men; but behind the tears suns are shining and stars look forth. Faintly and softly the waves of the Jordan lament our sorrow; mightily the cedars rustle of our strength and joy... This twofold nature of the Jewish soul holds nothing divided or rent for us any longer. Not for us: for we do not walk through Jewish life as sleep-walkers, like countless generations before us. And not to-day: for never is our hope of a restoration of our people so strong as in these Passover days, which are consecrated to freedom past and freedom to come.

For in them glows the whole vital force of our race. Other peoples celebrate the spring in nature. We celebrate the spring in our history, the great historic spring that began more than thirty-three centuries ago with the Exodus from Egypt, and the spring that has returned to us a thousand times since, the budding and sprouting of hope and confidence in the humblest huts of our race. As surely as tree and shrub, our existence belongs to the course of the world. Only a people whose conditions of existence are eminently earthly, and whose aims and will tower to the sunlit heights of ideals, could of itself and unconsciously find this proudest expression for a historic part. Without this expression we could not feel the breath of freedom in the Passover at all. The ancient historic festival is still free from the petrifaction of historical commemorations. A thousand golden threads are spun from past to present, and the mood accords but ill with a denial of religious and national Judaism which gives itself airs as a philosophy of life. Affirmation and strength, that is the meaning of our festival of freedom. Therefore on the Seder nights the herald of our redemption passes round Jewish houses and through Jewish hearts, a prince like the Titans of the German imperial legend and at the same time the spiritus familiaris of every Jew, Elijah the Prophet, in this figure the profoundest creation of the ocean-deep Golus fancy. Therefore the utterances of our national soul — which one profanes by calling them ceremonial — are at this season more profound than ever: we eat the bread of affliction, the bread of the stranger, not as festive pastry nor as holiday cake, but as food pure and simple, a token of the strength that can do without and may yet hope. Therefore the Haggadah, the passport of our wandering people, reads like a drama and a heroic lay; from its hoary pages blows the mountain air of Judaism, the eternally strong breath of great ages.

But for us still more than a feeling of life and a mood of strength may lie in the days of this festival: the will to live and the deed of life. So it was in former times. The Bible, which knows nothing of enthusiastic reverie, reports, apart from the wandering in the wilderness, four celebrations of the Passover: before the conquest of Canaan by Joshua, under the kings Zedekiah and Josiah, and finally under Ezra. These were without exception times of heightened national and religious activity, and our forefathers then thought upon their past and laboured for their present. Or take an example lying nearer to hand. The five men in B'ne B'rak, of whose long disputation on the Seder night we are told — they were not memorising anti-Zionist sermons for the following day — did not merely grow heated over the problem of their people's existence, but were also energetic helpers of their brethren, who shrank neither from long journeys nor from heavy outlay in order to support their fellows and to guard the interests of the oppressed. The learned expounders of the Haggadah, finally — there are remarkable inter-