FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   64   65   66   67   68   69   >>  
m is death even as the penalty for blaspheming God. Ibn Ezra held that, if Israel keep this commandment,--Honor thy father and thy mother,--it will not be exiled from the promised land. Exiled it was from the promised land, but obedience to the fifth Commandment did much to make the life of Israel despite exile one of the beauty of promise fulfilled. The grace and glory of the Jewish home were twofold. The selflessness of parents evoked such filial tenderness and self-forgetfulness as to bring about the perfect understanding of togetherness. The reverence of the Jewish child for parents continued even beyond death. The passing of the visible presence of a parent little lessened and often greatened the revering love of the Jewish child. This accounts for the pathos and romance associated with the "Kaddish" chant of the Hebrew liturgy, forerunner of the Mass, and perhaps in the mind of Jesus when he bade, Do this in remembrance of Me. This glorification of the Author of death as well as life, is not to be viewed as a symbol of ancestor-worship but rather as a sign of the tenderest of human pieties. What the child was in the Jewish home it became because of what its parents were toward it. To say that the Jewish mother has been unsurpassed in the history of men because she dreamed that a child by her borne might become a Messiah of its people does not quite touch the roots of the unbelievable tenderness and beauty of maternal dedication in the Jewish home. Neither is the relation of the Jewish father and child wholly to be explained by the fact of his involuntary aloofness from the world and his dependence upon the home for whatsoever of peace and joy this world could give him. It is not too much to say that the Messianic ideal of the Jewish mother and the fact of the Jew's exclusion from the world without may have tended to deepen and to hallow parental love, but the mystery abides not less wondrous in some ways than the mystery of Israel's survival. Certain perils, it might be imagined, were the inevitable accompaniment of or sequel to this wonderful love and reverence within the Jewish home,--the peril of repression of the inner life of the child chiefly and also of the parent. But students of Jewish history would hardly aver that the intellectual and spiritual nature of the child was really stifled or stunted by reason of the illimitable filial reverence. And if at times there was intellectual self-repression and
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   64   65   66   67   68   69   >>  



Top keywords:

Jewish

 

reverence

 

parents

 
Israel
 

mother

 
filial
 

beauty

 

history

 
parent
 
mystery

repression

 

tenderness

 
promised
 
intellectual
 
father
 

dreamed

 

people

 

Messianic

 

whatsoever

 
dependence

unbelievable

 
Messiah
 

explained

 

wholly

 

maternal

 

Neither

 
relation
 
aloofness
 

dedication

 

involuntary


perils

 

students

 

chiefly

 

spiritual

 

nature

 

illimitable

 

reason

 
stifled
 

stunted

 

wonderful


hallow
 

parental

 
abides
 
deepen
 
tended
 

wondrous

 

imagined

 
inevitable
 
accompaniment
 

sequel