Bahá’í World/Volume 8/Rejoice, O Israel

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[Page 869]

13.

REJOICE, O ISRAEL

BY ALICE SIMMONS COX

THERE is one ideal of human behavior which is destined to be of common interest and special appeal to many people of all races, classes and creeds in our present era. Even now, from the ranks of capitalist and laborer, Oriental and Occidental, Protestant and Catholic, Jew and Gentile are arising men and women aflame with new intent to establish upon earth a civilization conceived in the spirit of universal love and dedicated to the ideal that all men are created to live as brothers.

As this dream of spiritual world conquest calls to its banner an increasing number of heroes, the lines of the opposition accordingly tighten, to concentrate forces in desperate struggle to check the advance of human solidarity. Cries of the conflict go up from all parts of the globe—a civil insurrection or augmented race persecution being signs in one area, an international feud or discontent with political or religious tyranny bearing testimony in another. It is a time of universal fermentation, and of reconsideration of fundamental values. "A titanic, a spiritual struggle, unparalleled in its magnitude yet unspeakably glorious in its ultimate consequences, is being waged,” states Shoghi Effendi, Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith. “We stand on the threshold of an age whose convulsions proclaim alike the death pangs of an old order and the birth-pangs of the new.”¹ “The long ages of infancy and childhood, through which the human race had to pass, have receded into the background. . . . Unification of the whole of mankind is the hall-mark of the stage which society is now approaching.”²

This Bahá’í vision is a magnificent one. So strangely reminiscent is it of the words of poets and prophets spoken long ago that the human mind might naturally pause to wonder if once again men are following a will-o‘-the-wisp of imagination and desire. Embracing as it does the assurance of universal peace, the reconciliation of science and religion, a just distribution of this world’s material goods, a common auxiliary language, higher education for both men and women in things of mind and spirit, a more nearly perfect expression of the inherent capacities of every human soul and international cooperation in world affairs according to divine plan, it seems in this hour an unattainable goal. Yet the message of Bahá’u’lláh to the people of this age is intrinsically this: that the day of which Isaiah sang and St. John dreamed on the Isle of Patmos, the day of the coming of the spirit of holiness to the earth, is at hand.

To the people of Israel Bahá’u’lláh, the new Prophet of world order, has given a special benediction and announced the reason for great rejoicing. Their long tribulations are nearing an end. The movement for the establishment of a national home in Palestine is an early sign of their return to that happy station of a chosen people, when by the manifestation of illumined lives, reflecting the Will, the Knowledge and the Love of the Supreme Creator, they will proclaim to all the world: “Behold your God!” Before long the children of Abraham shall be exalted, their dispersion changed into “blissful gathering together” and “those who are hated shall become the beloved of the world.”³

"The time fore-ordained unto the peoples and kindreds of the earth is now come. The promises of God, as recorded in the Holy Scriptures, have all been fulfilled,” Bahá’u’lláh testifies.⁴ Alike, for those modernists who have cast away faith in ancient prophecies of all kind, even to the central belief in a Messiah and restoration of Palestine, and for the orthodox hearts who, in the face of frustration, still cling to the scriptural

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¹Unfoldment of World Civilization, p. 170.

²Idem., p. 202.

³From a Tablet of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.

⁴Gleanings, p. 12.

[Page 870] word, He gives the glad message: “Call out to Zion, O Carmel, and announce the joyful tidings: He that was hidden from mortal eyes is come! His All-conquering sovereignty is manifest; His All-encompassing splendor is revealed. Beware lest ye hesitate or halt. Hasten forth and circumambulate the City of God.”⁵

ISRAEL’S VISION OF PEACE

In order that we may see the picture in its proper perspective with historic background and modern setting, let us recall that vision of Isaiah, which in similar tone was revealed to other prophets: “He (the Lord) shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. . . .”⁶

Long did Israel preserve this life-giving vision in its heart, finding therein not only comfort, but a conviction of purpose and of destiny. The sons and daughters of later Talmud years were taught also to turn to the same vitalizing ideal phrased in the challenging words: “In God’s eyes the man stands high who makes peace between men; between husband and wife, between father and children, between masters and servants, between neighbor and neighbor. But he stands highest who establishes peace among the nations.”

Our picture is not a complete one unless We push back further into the centuries, even to the days of Abraham, that We may view the magnificent sweep of the spiritual drama of Israel as it unfolded through forty centuries. According to the Biblical narrative, now so pregnant with meaning when seen in the light of Bahá’u’lláh’s Revelation, God spoke to Abraham, His Prophet: “Lift up Thine eyes, and look from the place where Thou art, northward, and southward, and eastward and westward: For all the land which Thou seest, to Thee will I give it, and to Thy seed forever. And I will make Thy seed as the dust of the earth; so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall Thy seed also be numbered. . . . I am the Almighty God: walk before me, and be Thou perfect. And I will make a covenant between Me and Thee, and will multiply Thee exceedingly. . . . As for Me, behold My covenant is with Thee, and Thou shalt be a father of many nations. . . . And I will make Thee exceedingly fruitful, and kings shall come out of Thee. And I will establish My covenant between Me and Thee, and Thy seed after Thee, in Their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto Thee, and to Thy seed after Thee. . . . Thou shalt keep my covenant, therefore, Thou, and Thy seed after Thee, in their generations.”⁷

The Hebrew people are trying today to keep that Covenant. There is of this perhaps no greater evidence than the hope of resurrecting once more the spirit of an illustrious heritage, which at the zenith attracted to Jerusalem even the sages of Greece, but which after the division of the united kingdom and through centuries of separation on foreign soils found its pristine splendor dimmed. Whatever may have been the spiritual backslidings of this unusual and chosen people, in whatever way their faith may have felt the taint of that misinterpretation which in due time corrupts the pure message revealed to any people by a Prophet of God, however discouraged Jewry may have been at times, it has persistently refused on the whole to be entirely separated from the belief in special destiny and the age-long dream of righteousness, brotherly association and peace, the dawn of which Abraham foretold. So long as this ideal, born in their souls through the spirit of Abraham and brought into expression within narrow confines of the Holy Land by Moses and a succession of lesser prophets, so long as it remains short of complete realization—will there be Jews who continue to look forward with undaunted faith to their final deliverance as a people?

EMANCIPATION FAILS

For that one hundred years prior to about 1875 enlightened Jews, those who had come in contact with western learning, believed that they had found their Messianic age in the great measure of emancipation accorded to them by nations of the Christian World.

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⁵Idem., p. 16.

⁶Isaiah, 2:4.

⁷Genesis, 13:14-16; 17:1-9.

[Page 871] Tragic was their disappointment when experience revealed to them that they had not won freedom. Hatred and prejudice smouldered still. Assimilation and reformation both were but partially successful. The liberal Jew who had sacrificed nearly every vestige of his rich traditional culture and faith, found himself at the door of brotherhood with the door closed in his face. The way back home could not be found, for faith in what his forefathers cherished he had little by little denied, that he might sooner end his exile.

No man sees with more intelligent criticism the situation of Israel today than the thinking Jew himself. Perhaps this is, together with the hope of renaissance in Palestine, a sign of approaching victory. The wise men of the ages have counseled always, "Man, know thyself.” If out of humility, and by search, a deeply energizing vision may be born, the descendants of Abraham can find joy once more. It was with the vision of a future Messiah and a future national state at peace with the world that Israel survived, whether in the brilliance of liberal Muḥammadan Spain or in the darkness of the Ghetto. Persecution could not dim her hope as long as a flame gave any life to ancient forms. But when corruption from a world losing faith in God and forgetful of His Plan for all men touched this point of the Torah, when assimilation and baptism and reform desecrated the historic Holy of Holies in the recent century, Israel joined some other nations in the march of quick disintegration. Not that baptism or longing for economic and social security, or even the influence of western thought should have corrupted the Hebrew soul had Christianity been able to give the full spirit of the Christ in return for priority of loyalty to traditional understanding of the Law and the Prophets, but the nations of the west have themselves too long forfeited a profound love for God to be able to offer true fellowship, not to say true spiritual compensation. The spirit that had moved upon the waters of human life in every renaissance of progress from the time of Abraham to that of Jesus, that voice which later spoke through Muḥammad and inspired a civilization of great brilliance, has been stilled by waywardness in the majority of men. And so it was that many Israelites trying at last at the desperate hour to become one with other men through sacrifice of name and pride and traditional wealth found little reward for the soul.

If the remarkable efforts now centered in the rebuilding of Palestine meet a failure due to hostility of neighbor peoples, lack of international justice, or failure within the heart of Israel itself, students of the Hebrew fold fear that Israel faces a strange form of living death. They do not yet know Bahá’u’lláh’s message of gladness in rebirth, whereby they could be certain of success. They have not yet heard that even now in Persia where Bahá’u’lláh first spoke there are communities of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and Muḥammadans living together in understanding, love and peace. They do not yet know that in the future without sacrifice of the eternal values of their rich past — their literature, their language or their inspiration—they may be one with a world community of nations, where unity rules the essentials of common intercourse and diversity gives beauty to the whole.

“The Jews are faced with something much worse than mere assimilation or race death,” believes one of their most erudite leaders, Maurice Samuel. “They are moving, precisely at a time when their lot threatens to become harder than ever before, toward the mass imbecility which characterizes the world spirit of our time.”⁸

At that precise time when a multitude of diverse opinions and little unity marked the mind of Israel and a passionate desire for a better life took hundreds of Jews into the Gentile world, where neither by faith or religious form, manner or wish, they could be definitely known from the Christian, persecution broke out anew and with special vehemence where assimilation had been most complete. It is this persecution which is awakening Jews everywhere to the hope that may lie in returning to the folk ethos of their own people. Therein they desire to win at last, in brave loyalty to Judaism, the admiration, if not the love, of liberal nations and what is even more important, hope to renew within themselves, through

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⁸ Lewisohn, Ludwig, Rebirth, p. 318.

[Page 872] association with historic sources of land and literature, the spirit that made Israel of old a chosen people of God.

“The appearance of Zionism on the modern scene is half a miracle,” writes Milton Steinberg, seeming to sense in some measure the hand of Providence in the late-hour activity. “So far,” he continues, “it has worked surprisingly well. Should it fail in the end, the odds are that Israel is lost, its culture doomed, the personality of the individual Jew fated to protracted, if not permanent, maladjustment. . . . It infuses the drabness of Jewish existence with a spirit of adventure. It affords a dramatic purpose analogous to older dreams of a Messianic restoration. . . . It has opened new vistas of hope.”⁹ To the assiduous research and the illumined thinking of future historians must be left the last word concerning the detailed factors of causation in the continued existence of Israel as a people and the even more phenomenal rebirth which began at the close of the nineteenth century under the leadership of such heralds of change as Moses Hess, Leon Pinsker, Theodor Herzl, Aaron David Gordon and Aachad Ha’am. It is clear now, however, that if faithfulness to tradition and to ritualistic forms and to an indomitable conviction of a brilliant future kept Israel homogenous and lent some elements to the prolonged survival, so also, and perhaps with greater urgency, all anti-Semitic oppression influenced Jewry to remain one body. Recent persecution in middle Europe, on the basis of nationality and race rather than of religion, has served to renew Jewish solidarity when it was approaching final collapse. "It is not impossible that we might be wholly absorbed by the surrounding population if we were ever permitted to live in peace for the full space of two generations,” wrote Herzl. “We never are.”¹⁰

“To what kind of a community do we bear witness when we call ourselves Jews? What means this journey of ours through abyss?” questioned the eloquent pen of Martin Buber. "Shall we fall into oblivion through the mist of the millennium or does some primal force bear us onward to a fulfillment? What does it mean that we will to persist, not only as human beings, human spirit and human seed, but in defiance of the ages, in defiance of time itself—as Jews?’’¹¹

Bahá’u’lláh’s interpretation of past and present and His forecast of the future can perhaps be understood by consideration of the following four topics, which taken together reveal the cause of Jewish rebirth to be under the direction of God:

1) The return of the Jews to Palestine was actually foreseen by Biblical prophets.

It is of this, testifies Bahá’u’lláh, that Jeremiah wrote: "And I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all countries whither I have driven them, and will bring them again to their folds; and they shall be fruitful and increase. . . . Behold I will bring them from the north country and gather them from the coasts of the earth. . . . Therefore they shall come and sing in the heart of Zion, and shall flow together to the goodness of the Lord, for wheat, and for wine, and for oil, and for the young of the flock and of the herd: and their soul shall be as a watered garden. . . . And there is hope in thine end, saith the Lord, for thy children shall come again to their own border.”

In view of the present knowledge of historic events, the truth of the prophecies begins to clear, even to the conception of Israel being saved from complete spiritual dispersion by a new purification through God’s Will—a Will that ruled sanctification be a factor in the coming to birth of a spiritual order of maturity for mankind. In this light the sufferings of Jewish existence appear not too high a price to pay for ultimate spiritual attainment.

2) The remarkable restoration of the Holy Land is not motivated to any extent by desire to fulfill prophecies, or even by belief that prophecies would soon be fulfilled, but is propelled largely by forces beyond Jewish control. This suggests that the Unseen power of God may be working out an ancient plan.

Although the first attempts for colonization of Palestine by Jews began before the opening of the twentieth century they were

⁹Steinberg, Milton, The Making of the Modern Jew, p. 294.

¹⁰Lewisohn, op. cit., p. 28.

¹¹Idem., p. 90.

[Page 873] not notably successful nor were they supported by the approval of the majority of enlightened Jews in the West. Furthermore, numerous Jewish colonies were established in other regions than Palestine. This is highly significant for it indicates that the motivation was chiefly the hope of bettering social and cultural and even economic conditions of living.

With the new tides set in motion by the World War three other forces appeared to hasten colonization and to concentrate Jewish capacities in the promising Holy Land venture, which is now literally making the desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose and the wilderness and solitary place to be glad. One is the Balfour Declaration favoring “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people . . . it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”¹² From this hour, it is said, a new spirit came to animate the Jewish people. In 1922 the Council of the League of Nations ratified the selection of Great Britain, a powerful nation long experienced in dealing with minority peoples, as the holder of the mandate of this former part of the Turkish Empire. Third in time of influence have been the European governmental policies of expulsion, which not only force the most thoroughly assimilated Jews in the world to seek residence elsewhere, but unwittingly encourage fulfillment of Palestinian destiny. International attempts to help all refugees may have a similar effect with relation to the million or more Jews that the Holy Land may yet gradually provide for.

3) The recent re-invigoration of the world Jewish community, with redirection of effort, which is in fact but one of the evidences of world-wide upheaval and change, is caused by a new spiritual impetus from God. The forces of disturbance appearing in the world in the eighteenth century and the new hopes offered by the nineteenth century included in their orbit of change the breaking of barriers between Jewish and Aryan people, destroying the old status quo and affecting the life of Israel as we have described. The Jewish emancipation, the subsequent disappointment and the dawn of revival within Israel, were thus part of the larger unrest and transformation of which Bahá’u’lláh wrote many years before humanity realized the nature of the tremendous extent of the change. “The world’s equilibrium hath been upset through the vibrating influence of this most great, this new World Order,” He announced. “Mankind’s ordered life hath been revolutionized through the agency of this unique, this wondrous System—the like of which mortal eyes have never witnessed.”¹³

This new spirit in the world, as the rays of the eternal Sun of Life, is penetrating to the heart of Jew and Gentile alike. It brings the day of judgment, it encourages the hopes for peace, it relights the fires of spiritual life in souls that are begging for progress.

It is the Sun of the Word of God, revealed to the peoples of the centuries by such Manifestations of God’s Will as Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Zoroaster, and the Christ, that Word of Life which was before Abraham, in the beginning with God, the Creator, that effulgence of the attributes of divinity. This sun is again shining today. In the early days of the Christian dispensation its light assisted the Jews, though they knew it not, to retrieve a portion of their ancient glory in the environs of old Babylon, and in the days of Muḥammadan ascendancy to achieve notable intellectual attainments in spiritual contact with the Moors of Spain just prior to the sweep of the Inquisition. And in such manner today it has touched the hearts and minds of many Jewish leaders with its radiance and, though the effect may still be in the realms of the unconscious, it is nevertheless productive of new hope, courage and inspiration.

This brings us to our fourth point:

THE KING OF GLORY COMES

Bahá’u’lláh (Glory of God), Himself claiming° to be a Prophet of the Ancient Word of God, delegated to kindle the eternal fire in the souls of men, fulfilling the prophecies of all the scriptures, is reflecting the

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¹²Hayes, Carlton, Political and Social History of Modern Europe, p. 844.

¹³Gleanings, p. 136.

[Page 874] sun of God’s Will and Love to the world. He will unite by the power reflected through Him all streams of human progress in a great ocean of understanding and brotherly cooperation. It is He who will redeem Israel. The follower of Bahá’u’lláh who is gladdened by His message, sees in His teachings a divine guidance suited to the needs of this age, a divine assistance for deliverance from selfishness and greed, ignorance and prejudice, poverty and contention. In this dispensation is the Covenant of Abraham fulfilled. God renewed that Covenant through a succession of prophets, expanding its domain of influence with the growth of social communication and the enlarging of the circle of spiritual consciousness in the human race. Specifically and primarily it was a Covenant with the Hebrew people, but in reality it was a compact whose participants were destined to increase until Abraham’s spiritual seed should become “as the dust of the earth.” It has been an everlasting Covenant with a chosen people; also it has been kept alive and fruitful for those nations brought into its horizon of influence through successive Revealers of God’s Word, such as Jesus and Muḥammad, who in their turn proclaimed the validity of the Jewish dispensation and foretold its ultimate fulfillment in a universal brotherhood of men. The Abraham of the spirit who left the idols of Chaldean materialism and imagination and tradition to sojourn and to teach in Palestine was a Divine Messenger. He became the father of a great physical race that was to enjoy a special mission in history; He likewise became the spiritual father from whom countless generations of Israelites of the spirit have come, for it is true that wherever men of whatever race have acted with love for God and man they have been one as keepers of God’s eternal Covenant. Abraham, in another and less understood manner, was forbear of a great line of prophets, their spiritual predecessor and their physical ancestor. Isaiah and Jeremiah were Jews. Jesus, whose supreme spiritual genius gave Him sovereignty in the entire western world, was born of a Jewish mother through the line of Isaac and David. Muḥammad’s descent from Abraham can be traced to Ishmael, son of Abraham. The Báb, in whom Bahá’ís recognize the Herald (or the Elijah) of the Bahá’í era, was a direct heir of the House of Hashim and descendant thus of the Arabian Prophet and through Him, of Abraham. Bahá’u’lláh was heir of royal Persian blood coming from Zoroaster, ancient Prophet of Írán; and also through His mother was a descendant of Abraham through Katura and Jesse. Literally, by the seed of Abraham have the nations been blessed.

Through this seed of divine guidance will the dream of world brotherhood come true. Although practical commands of the Hebrew Covenant were intended for the Jews alone, and such peoples as might join them in the Mosaic dispensation, the inner reality of that Covenant, the specific spiritual teaching, was to remain the law forever because in its essence it is eternal, applicable to every age. Each new prophet renewed its potency, recalled for His special people its meaning and its promise. Each prophet, including Bahá’u’lláh who today as the Great Michael (Dan. 12) speaks for the whole of humanity, re-proclaimed Abraham’s revelation from God: "I am the Almighty God: walk before Me, and be Thou perfect.” Each Prophet abrogated those ordinances of His predecessor which were no longer adequate or suitable to meet the needs of an evolving humanity.

ISRAEL’s MISSION

Under the guidance of this new universal Messenger, the “Desire of the nations,” the meaning of the service to be rendered by God’s peculiar people in uniting humanity assumes magnitude even beyond their vision. It is true that each great religious order of the world sees itself as a chosen vehicle not only for the most effective transmission of God’s spirit to men, but also God’s plan for universal salvation in an eventual establishment of world harmony, justice and peace. Although the faithful believers in each of these groups could not all be right in their understanding on this matter, the error may lie, not so much in their vision of a future civilization motivated by religion, as in the desire which would exalt any one specific institutional name, rather than proclaim the spirit of love which gave each birth under [Page 875] whatever name was appropriate to the time. Inasmuch as this spirit of love becomes renewed and re-lived by all peoples, all will become instruments of God’s purpose in building a Kingdom of Righteousness on earth, whether under a new name or an old. In this program Israel will do her part. The return to Palestine is already effecting her regeneration as a nation with a positive and dynamic attitude.

Seeing the importance of this function which Israel may serve in the world, Albert Einstein has written: “I am a national Jew in the sense that I demand the preservation of the Jewish nationality, as of every other. . . . But my Zionism does not exclude cosmopolitan views. . . . I believe that every Jew has duties toward his co-religionists. . . . Through the return of the Jews to Palestine, and so to a normal and healthy economic life, Zionism involves a creative function, which should enrich mankind at large.”

There seems, however, to be a more distinctive mission than this reserved for the Jews, which does not nullify, but enhances the significance of the present restoration and aids the cause of world regeneration. From Old Testament wisdom we may learn that the Jewish national home is to be the center of the new world civilization. Whatever of good Palestine will do for the Jews themselves as one aid to rebirth in this transition era before that civilization is firmly established, whatever of worth the Jews may give to the world as a creative nation once more, above all of this, and because of this perhaps, they are now laying the substructure of the world capital. When the federation of nations is achieved, as Bahá’u’lláh assures us it will be, this people, capable of great mental accomplishment, and of supreme love, self-sacrifice and forgiveness, will become the hosts of all the races and religions which were for so long inhospitable to them. For it is in Palestine that Occident and Orient find their natural meeting ground; it is in Palestine from the growing metropolis of Haifa-Acca today that the vitalizing forces of Bahá’u’lláh’s Revelation radiate to all the earth; it is in the Holy Land, indicates Shoghi Effendi, where will be established “the nerve center of a world civilization, the focus where the unifying forces of life will converge”; it is from this historic place that the Branch of guidance in this Day of Jehovah will be the standard of the nations, and the prophecies of princely authority, like unto that of David, be fulfilled.

Israel will complete the superstructure in Palestine when the universal impulse of creation, released through Bahá’u’lláh, becomes the conscious living core of her own unity throughout the world, when through it she is once again at one with the primordial motives of her being as a people illumined, when as Zion (at Jerusalem) rejoicing with Carmel (at Haifa) she may give of her talents to the service of mankind. Because of the fact that co-eval with this evolution will come the spiritual maturity of other peoples, Israel will find in the rising commonwealth of nations—the new Jerusalem —that her problems of how to live in a non-Jewish world has been solved, for her as a nation, or for all Jews who in foreign lands prefer to move the way of ultimate assimilation. This, because the age in which we live will recognize “its new and living Word.” Injustice and prejudice will vanish and the Jew, wherever he lives, will become known for his virtues. “Thou shalt no more be termed forsaken. . . . And the Gentiles shall see thy righteousness, and all kings thy glory. . . . Thou shalt also be a crown of glory in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of thy God.”¹⁴ Under the unclouded Sun of a new revelation, when religion once again directs the conscious efforts of men, the new Jew will be received into a joyous international citizenship. His folk religion will have been fully expanded to meet the radically changed needs of the time.

Then will there be singing on Mount Zion.

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¹⁴Isaiah, 62:4.

[Page 876]

Some of the Bahá’ís of Bombay, India gathered to bid farewell to their indefatigable fellow-worker, Miss Martha Root on the occasion of her departure for Australia and New Zealand. (Miss Root holds a bouquet of flowers.)