RABBI STEPHEN S. WISE, Free Synagogue, Carnegie Hall, in an address to twenty-eight confirmands-“Jews die but the Jew lives. Everywhere there stands the undying Jew.
“Confirmation, or, as I prefer to call it-self-consecration, means that you believe in your souls. More priceless than possessions is the faith of the Jew in his soul. The intangible is more real than the tangible.
“All that Israel means is these undying values, Empires may rise and fall, republics may pass, but the values that are bound up with the greatness of our immortal souls live eternally.
“I confess to you that I would be ready to forsake hope if I did not see and know the forces are victorious only for a day, that the forces of truth and justice are the only enduring forces in the world of God. We may be wounded and calumniated, but still, still, and still we are the deathless Israel. The things for which we strive-freedom of spirit and justice-shall last.
“I do not ask happiness for you, nor peace, security or joy, but only what a commander asks of his soldiers-honor! honor! honor! You hold in your hand the most precious flag-the flag of the army of the Lord. He is our guardian and he will be our redeemer.”
ON HITLERISM BANKRUPTEY
RABBI LOUIS I. NEWMAN, Congregation Rodeph Sholom, 7 West Eighty-third street.-“The Madison Square Garden Meeting was an abortive attempt to defend an indefensible cause. It was a stupid attempt to conceal the drift of Nazi Germany to bankruptey. The falling exports and the collapse of Germany’s trade indicate that Hitler must pay the price for the acts which stained his hands with blood.
“The decent elements within the German people must now act. They must throw off the self-hypnosis to which they have surrendered themselves. They must see that the only way they can recover the world’s confidence is to banish the men who have made Germany’s name anathema throughout the world.
“As for the organizers of the Madison Square Garden Meeting, it will be well for them to remember that Americans who fought the ‘Hun’ and the ‘Boche’ after the invasion of Belgium and the sinking of the Lusitania, have not yet forgotten the acts of ‘Shrecklichkeit’ during 1914 and 1917.”
PROMISE OF THE FUTURE
RABBI JOSEPH ZEITLIN, Temple Ansche Chesed, West End avenue at 100th street.-“If we could learn to regard life as a symphony, many of our disappointments and disillusionments would disappear. For just as a musical theme must allow for rests or pauses to exist without the beauty of its message being interrupted, so too, our lives are beset with many tribulations, that we must overcome. The way to attain spiritual fortification is to equip oneself with an attitude of regarding life in its totality.
“Civilization today is being disgraced by the actions of Nazis. But out of this darkness there ######### emerge an era of light. The ######### has once more been called upon to play the part of the ‘hero of the spirit!
“By his very sufferance and forehearance he opens up the eyes of the world to the need for tolerance, brotherliness an enlightenment. From the evils of the present, there shall come good in the future.”
THE BASIS IN ETHIES
RABBI WILLIAM MARGOLIS, Congregation Chab Zedek, 118 West Ninety-fifth street.-“World problems will find solution neither in the radical’s harangues nor in the councils of the despot! The ethical factors of national or racial character are not the only ones, neither are they the most important. The spiritual factors of education, morality and faith constitute the real touchstone of nations and peoples. God’s supernal laws of life must inevitably raise humans above the ordinary engrossments of life, impelling men and women to realize the true obligations arising out of social relationship.
“As men emerge out of the moral chaos and economic morass that characterized recent years, let that emergence be permanent. Man should now return to the time-tried and time-tested truths of God’s law. The Bible, divinely written and divinely taught, must again become the Code of Life. For if God is not the author of all Law, then there is no law really binding.”
MEANING OF CONFIRMATION
RABBI ISRAEL GOLDSTEIN, Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, Eighty-eighth street, west of Broadway.-“What does Confirmation mean to the Jewish people### We are an ancient people which in and through its youth is ever renewed. By virtue of our history, we are as old as the oldest, and thanks to our children who in the ceremony of Confirmation avow their kinship with that historic past, we are as young as the youngest. The word ‘confirm’ means to strengthen, to make firm. Therefore, Confirmation is a source of strength to the Jewish people.
“The word ‘confirm’ also means to verity, to attest. Our boys and girls, by that ceremony, verify and attest the character of the Jewish people which was received at Sinai-namely, that our existence as a seperate people is not merely a biological will to live. We have a right to our existence only insofar as we remain a people dedicated to the highest moral and ethical idealism. If we are merely to be another group, without any special place or purpose, it would hardly justify our suffering and martyrdom. Why endure persecution, discrimination, humiliation### The only thing that justifies such a price is the conviction that just as our existence in the past has brought humanity the Decalogue upon which its moral and ethical code is founded, the prophetic exhortations upon which its ideals of Peace and Brotherhood are founded, and the God concept upon which its monotheism is founded, so too our preservation in the future can bring spiritual and cultural benefits of incalculable value.”
THE COMMON HERITAGE
RABBI WILLIAM F.ROSENBLUM, Temple Israel, 210 West Ninety-first street.-“My message today is to parents, Jews and Christians alike, to rededicate themselves to the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments that are our common heritage. Let them go out in the workaday affairs of the world and insist that race shall not be set against race, that only one genealogy be recognized, our descent from God himself. Let one commandment be held supreme, the rulership of God.
“Then dictatorship of mass or class or tyrant or tyro will not succeed and the world return to normal. Then, and not before, can we sincerely demand of our children that they walk in the way of their fathers.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
