ave for its obviously
necessary inclusion in the Decalogue, the Jew has always dealt with
filial obedience as it dealt with the theory of divine existence or
the fact of Israel's persecution taking all alike for granted.

If the conflict in the home is a little sharper within than without
Jewish life, this is in some degree the defect of its quality. The
large part played by the home in the life of the Jew makes the
transition to the new order seem harsh and bitter. The Jewish parent
of yore lived his life within the walls of the home, and the Jewish
mother particularly passed her days within the limits of a home. It is
not easy for the Jewish mother to surrender that sense of possession
which grows out of undivided preoccupation with child or children,
that sense of possession fostered as much by a child's sense of
dutifulness as by parental concern. The Jewish mother, whom the
middle-aged have known and loved, found her deepest and most
engrossing interest in the days and deeds of her children. It may be
and it is necessary for the Jewish mother to relinquish her long-time
sense of ownership, but let it not be imagined to be easy. And it is
the harder because with, perhaps before, its relinquishment comes a
sense of deep loss and hurt to the child.

Nor would the necessity of yielding up the sense of possession in
itself be so serious, if there did not coincide with it an ofttimes
exaggerated sense of independence in the Jewish child. We may be
witnessing an almost conscious break with the centuried tradition of
filial self-subordination, or it may be that the revolt of the Jewish
child seems more serious than it is because of the filial habit of
obedience in the life of the Jewish home. Whatever be the explanation
of the new filial role in the Jewish home, it is a sorry thing that
Israel in its assimilative passion should be ready to surrender the
home and its historic content, should be so unsure of itself and so
sure of the world without as to be willing to give up its best and
most precious for the sake of uniformity with the world.

And there are Jews who forget that the world reverences and honors the
Jewish home even as it reveres the Bible of the Jew! A wise friend has
written: "Whenever and wherever I have been asked by non-Jews what I
consider the greatest and most permanent contribution of the Jew to
civilization, I have always answered: the Jewish home. Ancient Greece
knew of no real home as we understa