next, and to strive for that
vigorously, so as not to drift like helpless flotsam and jetsam. We
need strong beliefs which, as Bagehot puts it, win strong men, and
then make them stronger.

_Judaism Must Speak to Us in the Language of Today_

IN the Talmud we find the principle enunciated that the Torah adopted
the style of language that men were wont to use. A condition
indispensable to a religion being an active force in human life is
that it speak to men in terms of their own experience. Judaism, to be
significant to modern man or woman, can no longer afford to speak in
the language of theology. Psychology and social science, history and
human experience, have revealed new worlds in the domain of the
spirit. The language of theology might have a certain quaintness and
charm to the ears of those to whom religion is a kind of dreamy
romanticism. But to those who want to find in Judaism a way of life
and a higher ambition, it must address itself in the language of
concrete and verifiable experience.

The ideas in which Judaism was wont to spell itself out in the past
are no longer at home in the Weltanschauung of the modern man. What
prevented the Reform movement from becoming a real reformation and a
vitalization of Judaism was that it sought to adjust Judaism to a
Weltanschauung which had already begun to grow obsolete. We have to
reckon with all that has been learned in the meantime concerning human
society and the place of religion in it. When one comes to a strange
land, and has with him only the coin of his native country, he must
calculate in terms of the currency of the land he is in, if he wants
to know whether or not he has enough to live on. Can we Jews afford to
live spiritually upon our heritage? That can only be answered if we
learn what that heritage is equivalent to in the current mental coin
of the modern man. If we do not wish to be cut off from the stream of
living thought, if we do not want to be spiritually starved, we Jews
must know not so much what Judaism meant twenty centuries ago, nor
even a century ago, but what it is to mean to us of today.

[Illustration: Signature: MMKaplan]

EDITORS' NOTE.--_In articles to follow, Professor
Kaplan will give his conception of "What Judaism Is."_

The Jewish Student in Our Universities

_A Menorah Prize Essay_

BY MORRIS J. ESCOLL

[Illustration: _MORRIS J. ESCOLL (born in Russia, 1893, came to
America in 1896), gradua