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No. 23. | Vienna, 6 June 1902. | 6th Year

For the Feast of Weeks.

The Feast of the First-fruits . . . Like the tender fragrance of sheaves its gentle breath enfolds us caressingly. The mood of the Book of Ruth, with its simple peace, rises up before us. We find ourselves in the Temple at Jerusalem, and the priests, with prayers of thanksgiving, offer up to the Lord two loaves from the new wheat as a sacrifice. Times long past! The gold-gleaming bundles of the grain have long ceased to adorn the desolate fields of Judaea; silent now is the alternating song of the reapers and the merry clink of scythes on the meadows of Beth-Lehem; out of the gentle idyll of Ruth of old has grown a grey history of suffering, the history of the eternal wanderer among the nations. The seven weeks, which were once counted, doubtless in joyful expectation of the coming harvest blessing, from the ripening of the barley to the mowing of the wheat, have been turned into weeks of mourning, filled with the most painful memories of our history. Sefirah . . . And yet, of all our festal seasons, the Feast of Weeks bears the most cheerful aspect. It has, so to speak, preserved a rustic trait from the days of antiquity. Garlands of flowers and green foliage in the consecrated place, floral decoration and fragrant grasses in the dwelling-houses — much the same, no doubt, was the harvest festival kept in Israel in the days of Boaz and Ruth.

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It is characteristic of the national keynote of our festivals that precisely for Shabuoth, which tradition designates as the anniversary of the giving of the Law, of the divine Revelation, no symbolic rite of consecration whatever is prescribed, such as, for the Passover, the obligatory eating of unleavened bread and bitter herbs, or, for Sukkoth, the dwelling in the booth and the consecration of the "four fruits." These and other symbolic acts of our ceremonial — unhappily there is no better substitute for this ugly and inapt word — do indeed also point to particular events in the earliest history of the Jewish people, and are thus to that extent national in character; but as fixed ordinance, as normative prescription, they are simply religious. One might indeed say, by way of generalisation: every symbolic act has something religious about it. For the Feast of Weeks, on the other hand, there holds merely the commandment to abstain from labour, without any addition of a religious rite. Shabuoth is thus a holiday rather than a feast-day, a day of rest and rejoicing for the people after the toilsome weeks of harvest labour — hence the name.

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" . . . And bring near together our scattered ones from the midst of the nations, and gather our dispersed from the ends of the earth, and lead us to Zion, Thy city, with rejoicing, and to Jerusalem, Thy holy place, with everlasting joy . . ." "And lead Israel back to its dwelling-places; there will we go up, appear before Thee, and bow down before Thee in the House which Thou hast chosen . . ." Once more these fervent words of longing from our festival prayer will resound in all the synagogues — wherever the red pencil of our "patriotic" assimilationists has not presumptuously held sway. Foolish presumption! If the improvers and diluters of our prayers are bent on weeding out all national memories and hopes, then they ought straightway to draw a thick line through the whole prayer-book. Otherwise their work is miserable, inadequate patchwork . . .

M. Z.