e monotheistic belief from pagan pollution
and to keep it intact. Neither in the Deuteronomic law nor in the late
codes of Maimonides and Joseph Caro is there any toleration for idolatrous
practices, for instruments of idol-worship, or for idolaters.(133) This
attitude gave the enemies of the Jew sufficient occasion for speaking of
the Jewish God as hating the world, as if only national conceit underlay
the earnest rigor of Jewish monotheism.

9. As a matter of fact, since the time of the prophets Judaism has had no
national God in any exclusive sense. While the Law insists upon the
exclusive worship of the one God of Israel, the narratives of the
beginnings in the Bible have a different tenor. They take the lofty
standpoint that the heathen world, while worshiping its many divinities,
had merely lost sight of the true God after whom the heart ever longs and
searches. This implies that a kernel of true piety underlies all the error
and delusion of paganism, which, rightly guided, will lead back to the God
from whom mankind had strayed. The Godhead, divided into gods--as is hinted
even in the Biblical name, _Elohim_--must again become the one God of
humanity. Thus the Jew holds that all worship foreshadows the search for
the true God, and that all humanity shall at one time acknowledge Him for
whom they have so long been searching. Surely the Psalms express, not
national narrowness, but ardent love for humanity when they hail the God
of Israel, the Maker of heaven and earth, as the world's great King, and
tell how He will judge the nations in justice, while the gods of the
nations will be rejected as "vanities."(134) Nor does the divine service
of the Jew bear the stamp of clannishness. For more than two thousand
years the central point in the Synagogue liturgy every morning and evening
has been the battle-cry, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is
One." And so does the conclusion of every service, the _Alenu_, the solemn
prayer of adoration, voice the grand hope of the Jew for the future, that
the time may speedily come when "before the kingdom of Almighty all
idolatry shall vanish, and all the inhabitants of the earth perceive that
unto Him alone every knee must bend, and all flesh recognize Him alone as
God and King."(135)

Chapter X. The Name of God

1. Primitive men attached much importance to names, for to them the name
of a thing indicated its nature, and through the name one could obtain
mastery