ature: D.S. Blonsheim]

_University of Illinois_

II

JUDAISM AND PHILANTHROPY[C]

SOME years ago I met a certain Russian Jew at a conference called to
discuss various problems of education. He was an immigrant who had
made his fortune through speculation in real estate, and with his rise
in fortune he had, it was evident, thrown off, one after another, the
social habits, the religious outlook, and the organization of the
daily life which were the heritage he had brought with him from
Russia. He was at that time, he told me, president of a large Jewish
congregation, whose pillars of support were men like himself. He
complained bitterly of their backwardness and illiberality. They would
not introduce an organ and refused to change the prayer book or to
secure an "advanced" rabbi. For himself, he did not care whether they
had a synagogue--I mean temple--at all. He retained no longer any of
the superstitions or narrowness of his colleagues, and if it were not
for the fact that he felt himself out of place among members of the
radically reformed temple he would have attended that long ago. He was
a member of it, of course. His wife had made him join some years ago.
It was a double expense, to be sure, but his wife wanted to be active
in the Women's Council, and the children met other nice children in
the Sunday School. He did not think anyhow that synagogal affiliation
made any difference.

"I am," he said, "a good Jew. I give charity."

The remark took me aback, yet the logical development to the point of
view that he expressed was inevitable. In an environment where the
call of ambition is generally a call toward de-Judaization, the
connection between Jews who prosper and the great masses of the
Jewish people becomes, perforce, an external and artificial one. It is
notorious that the temple has thus far had no appeal to and no message
for the Jewish masses, that its membership is recruited from the
well-to-do and the successful, and that its relation to the great
groups which are destined never to be well-to-do or successful becomes
purely a relation of philanthropy. The elements of brotherhood, of a
common consciousness and a common purpose, fade or get submerged.
Where the masses are concerned the whole corporate essence of reformed
Judaism becomes concentrated in the word "charity."

_Justice vs. Charity in the Jewish Ideal_

YET it is significant that in Hebrew there is no special word for
chari