determines the invocation of God; in which
the ideal of a free and happy humanity, in a just and democratic
society, is the dominating ideal; in which a righteous Jewish state is
a persistent aspiration. This is the Hebraism which must underly all
the activities of the Menorah Association.

This Hebraism, academically realized through study, must be realized
in the lives of individuals through work, as Dr. Grossmann has well
said, and in the life of the great Jewish mass in a free Jewish state.
Every ideal we acquire from the past must be turned into a fact of the
present. _Noblesse oblige!_

DR. DAVID PHILIPSON

I am reminded that this day marks the one hundredth anniversary of the
signing of the Treaty of Ghent--one hundred years of peace between
English-speaking peoples. I need to be reminded of this after the
speech that has just been made, because much that was said has quite
fired my fighting spirit--but this is a day of peace and it might not
be quite in the spirit of this anniversary day to say all I might
otherwise say in answer to the points that have been made and with
which I differ radically.

There are some things in Dr. Kallen's eloquent address that I do
believe, but there are many more things with which I do not agree. But
let that be as it may, I was very much interested in his remark, that
the "Reform sect," as he is pleased to call us, harks back to the
prophets. This has been claimed frequently by the reformers
themselves, but he puts a new interpretation upon it; he says the
prophets were pre-Judaistic. This is the Christian point of view. They
claim that Judaism was the growth of the post-exilic period, but we
reformers interpret the term Judaism altogether differently.

_The Significance of Reform Judaism_

Judaism means for us the Jewish religion and all that this implies; if
the Reform movement in its beginnings went back to prophetism it was
simply for this reason--that the pioneers of the Reform movement
recognized that the Jews had fallen into the very condition that Dr.
Kallen deprecates, namely, they had gotten away from life inasmuch as
they had been confined to the ghetto where they had been excluded from
the currents of contemporary life. Judaism had become a ghetto
religion, and because of this divorce between life and religion the
Reform movement arose. The Reform movement is not simply a matter of
creed. It affects the whole life of the Jew. One of its basic
principles i