han the term
charity, it is still, in intention, a charitable thing. It is not a
thing done through the inevitable forms of right social organization,
but through the gracious good will of a kindly individual. It still
maintains the Christian quality of "grace" which is a condescension, a
going down, a philanthropy. It stands in contrast to _law_, which
knows no such qualities, and the call which Mr. Lewis makes to liberal
Judaists for a special kind of social service is itself a
demonstration that "liberal Judaism" thus far has little in common
with the substance of Jewish life. Indeed his whole book is a
demonstration of this fact, for of the six chapters that it contains
only one has anything to say of social service as such in the present
day, while four are analyses, not of charity, but of the law of
righteousness as it operated in the Jewish polity, both in Palestine
and in the Diaspora. Even the actual charity of the Middle Ages
carries a quality of obligation and socially ordained necessity which
is derived from the basic law of the Jewish people.

_The Hope of Liberal Judaism_

BUT to-day, while the great Jewish masses still live, more or less
adequately under the basic law and exercise such righteousness as they
may in the division of obligation which the laws of the Galuth lands
compel, the classes are divorced from its rule altogether. The call
with which Mr. Lewis closes his book,--

"We must teach the masses of our people, upon whom the
Judaism of yesterday has lost hold, that their
salvation lies in liberal Judaism, which is beginning
to find itself to-day and which will become the
Judaism of to-morrow,"

--is the best indication of this. Liberal Judaism has not touched the
minds or hearts of the masses. The radicals despise it as a
capitalistic system of compromise with the social environment. To the
rest of the working classes, it makes thus far no appeal whatever. It
is only upon the radicals that the "Judaism of yesterday" has lost its
hold, and to them liberal Judaism can have no appeal. To the rest of
the Jewish people it can be significant and really developed into the
"Judaism of to-morrow" only in so far as it can succeed in
reincorporating itself into the common life. I am an old social
service person, and I am prepared to deny categorically that such a
reincorporation is possible through social service. What is needed is
sympathetic intelligence,