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No. 16. | Vienna, 17 April 1903 — 20 Nissan 5663. | 7th Year

The Close of Passover

W. The Seder evenings are past. Passover draws to its end, and already we are counting the days that separate Passover from the feast which we keep in remembrance of our — no, not of our — in remembrance of the giving of the Law to the most eminent part of the whole civilised world; for even if, as some think, it could do no harm were the halo of the chosen people to grow dimmer, one thing can never be taken from us: that for thousands of years at the very least we were the mediators of those unassailable principles upon which the civilised world of to-day, in its most important parts, is founded.

This Law, however, begins with the words: "I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." And so it had to begin; for only to the liberated could Moses proclaim the laws, and only for the free and the independent were they given. To win freedom, and to use it above all for the making of laws for eternity, and to take the yoke of those laws upon oneself before all others — that is what Israel did. Such was the intoxication of freedom that possessed our fathers.

To be sure, this striving after redemption was not directed alike, nor alike strong, among all the sons of the people. Slavery had injured too many too deeply for them not to have misjudged, or even regretted, the springtime of their people. There were the rich, a vanishing few, certainly, beside the mass of ill-used proletarians tormented to the very blood. This minority, whose influence naturally stood in inverse proportion to its numbers, had from the very beginning looked with disfavour upon the aspirations of the people toward freedom. They held aloof, and followed only reluctantly — and assuredly not all of them — the march into an uncertain future. They belonged, it is true, to a despised people, but things did not, after all, go so very ill with them — and the temple of Ré was not closed either, if one only took proper pains to get in. Then there were many who had leased all wisdom for themselves alone. With an ironical smile they reckoned up for the people that thirsted after freedom how impossible it would be to feed so great a multitude, how mighty were the obstacles that stood in its way, what States had a positively vital interest in seeing that the soil of the homeland it aspired to should not fall into its hands, how small the land was, and so forth. And they showed how the people was positively doing itself harm by clinging to such illusions. Quite by the way, they certainly mentioned as well that one could not remove from a highly cultivated country into a wilderness, that so poor a people would suffer want even of the barest necessities, quite apart from the fact that this people would never learn order and lawfulness.

And again, one or another from among the people regarded the striving after political redemption as nothing short of a misfortune. In his opinion it sufficed if the Israelite spirit found in some form — an élite form, naturally — a centre in the land of the fathers. Whatever lay outside this centre would come into consideration only afterwards. With bitter scorn he pursued every effort that was made to redeem the wretched.

But all these various resistances, secret and open, went down without a trace in the sacred will of the people to be free. Bitter vexation may well at times have seized the leaders of the movement for freedom, when they saw themselves misjudged, disparaged, and threatened in their most important undertakings by obstinate fanatics of the most diverse theories. And not all of them, perhaps, had the superior calm to let these intolerant idolaters of the greyest and most pinched theorems have their way. But what could all that signify when at last the hour of redemption struck? The radiant sun of the young freedom of the people warmed the most withered hearts, the most parched brains. And they learned the hardest thing a man in his pride can learn — they learned to believe, to trust...

Even the relapses into their old bondage could not endure. How once, in their torpor, with their mortally sick souls, they had mis-