Four Parashiyot before and after Purim (Shekalim, Zakhor, Parah, ha-Hodesh). Morais, Sabato. Philadelphia, PA. Undated · Sabato Morais Digital Repository · Legacy Projects from Judaica DH at Penn Libraries

Title

Four Parashiyot before and after Purim (Shekalim, Zakhor, Parah, ha-Hodesh). Morais, Sabato. Philadelphia, PA. Undated

Author

Morais, Sabato

Location(s)

United States -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia

United States -- Pennsylvania

Format

10 pages on 4 sheets

Rights

http://rightsstatements.org/page/NoC-US/1.0/?

Language(s)

English

Source

Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies

Sabato Morais Collection, Box 10, Folder 3

Has Format

https://colenda.library.upenn.edu/items/ark:/81431/p3xk8584v/manifest.json

Link to Colenda

https://colenda.library.upenn.edu/catalog/81431-p3xk8584v

Provenance

Transfer of Custody from the Hebrew Education Society, 10 March 1913.

Is Format Of

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/judaicadh/morais/main/TEI/SMBx10FF3_14.xml

content

On Sabbath Parah

[Hebrew] [Hebrew] "I had pity on my holy name, which the house of Israel profaned among the nations, whither they have gone". Who are they of the house of Israel that Ezekiel condemns in his ardent zeal for his Master? Who are they that bring scandal upon the Author of our faith? Jews who misuse a supreme trust. Jews who study the whims and notions of the age in which they live, and not sacred duty. They make gentiles cry with a smile of irony and a scornful shake of the head "Forsooth such are the people of the Lord".
Listen my Brethren. Brazen gates and wide rivers are not impediments to the mind in which God dwells, to a mind stirred up by the spirit of prophecy. Jour--neying on its wings, the man of Chebar, rested his far-seeing eye on the time serving and faithless. He beheld them in Judea before the total dispersion. He beheld them again when exiled to the land of the Chaldeans. The false notably occupied responsible places, enjoyed high offices.

Ezekiel stood within the courts of the Jerusalem Temple. He looked. A partition had been cautiously raised, as a hindrance to the unintended. But a voice said "Son of man break through and mark the seam." Lo! the [?] of the nation are engaged in an abominable service. They burn incense not in honor to the living God, but to vulgar figures painted by a heated imagination. The Seer averts his eyes in dismay from a spectacle so degrading. He goes in search of the lowly among his coreligionists. Surely, they cannot be infected with the sins ram--pant among the socially elevated. But on his way he meets the pastors of an easily led flock. They are fat, and sleek and well covered with the wool shorn from off their charges. Those pampered keepers care not if the flock denied wholesome food, run over strange fields, and become poisoned with noxious weeds. They can find others more ready to fleece. Ezekiel contemplating that scene, pours out a vial of righteous indignation "Woe be to the shepherds of Israel....The weak you have not strengthened, the diseased you have

healed, the broken you have not bound up, the strayed ones you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought after. Thus says the Lord, I am against the shepherd. I will require my flock form the hand"
Brethren! Our Haftorah is a sequel to a series of denunciations against men into whose guardianship the interest of the Jewish religion was committed, but who promoted only their own advantage, men who ought to have glorified the olden faith, but let indif--ference drag it into a pit of disgrace. Has the house of Israel, after so many trials and vicissitudes, been rid of such individuals? Are our chiefs--mainly our so-called spiritual leaders--very chary not to bring scandal upon the name we hear? The question is pertinent on a Sabbath like the present. It speaks of the need of purification. In ancient times the sprinkling of water, into which had been cast a handful of the burnt ashes of a red heifer, of a piece of cedar wood, a chip of hyssop, and a thread of scarlet yarn--whose colours ty-pified sin--cleansed the Hebrews defiled by contract with polluting objects.

So purified, they could join the Congregation in the na--tional feast of the redemption from slavery--the ap--proaching Passover. We ourselves are nearing the important period of our year, and the additional portion of the Pentateuch announces it. But many of those who should instruct us to fittingly hold the celebration, are sullied and tainted. They still make gentiles derisively exclaim, "Forsooth, such are the people of the Lord." I remember how just twenty five years ago about the season, when an Israelitish history, which would tear into shreds, as worthless rags the Israelitish history written by Moses and the prophets issued from the press, I was accosted by a Christian acquaintance. He remarked: if the statements of the author I have now read are correct, the Hebrew Scriptures must be a tissue of deceptions, but I must believe that your Bible is inspired, I must also consider it unwarrantable in your Rabbi to represent on a false light what the civilized world has accepted as truths at the hands of the Jews. So spoke one not born in the law, to shame those who are its sworn keepers, but whom the heresies of untrusty guides

led astray. For, if the military skill, and schemes and maneuvering of a shrewd general and not the direct interposition of a God who abhors injustice and loves goodness purchased our fathers' deliverance, then all preparations to solemnize the anniversary of that wait in a signal manner, are simply senseless. Why, the very opening of the Decalogue would be an imposition on our credulity, an execrable falsehood. The thought is blasphemy.
But what would my gentile neighbor have said at the developments of the last quarter of a century? What at the heartlessness of a teacher who, having under his charge bright promising youths, instead of enkindling in their breasts the fire of enthusiasm, quenches the [?], first sparks of religious fervor? A teacher who labors to explain away whatever discloses the wonderful dealings of the Almighty with the seed of his righteous Abraham, and brings a Moses to the level of a conjurer and juggler? Oh! call it not heartlessness, my brethren, but crime, not unlike that against which Ezekiel exclaimed, when he saw the elders of Israel engaged in abominations, in the very chamber of the Temple, and the shepherds who let

the flock go to destruction. For infidelity to a religious trust is worse than idolatry; the warping of children's minds exceeds the sin of selfishness. The Sages recommended to their scholars extreme caution so as not to utter a word capable of misapprehension, how then to instill drop by drop a full measure of disbelief into the guileless, and then lend then forth to engraft upon others the bane they have imbibed? Can anything forebode a quicker ruin to Judaism? I do not assert that it so actually happens; but my fears are well grounded. They are based upon an extraordinary utterance of that teacher, made public enough to elicit adverse comments. Formerly one sinning so flagrantly would have been excomunicated, and disqualified from entering the threshhold of God's sanctuary. And who would have consented to his ascending the pulpit?
Unhappily, it is the want of some ecclesiastical disa--pline that threatens incalculable evils. Not a hierarchy, with the power of fulminating anathemas, but an advisory board, sanctioned by the leading con--gregations in the land, and the weight of whose moral

authority might serve as a check upon individual arbitrariness. We would not then hear that the house once dedicated to the worship of what Israelites believe to be a Truth, is lent for the performance of that which Israelites believe to be a falsehood; that in the same spot the acknowledg--ment of the Unity of God is made upon the Sabbath, and of the trinity on Sunday. Such [?] inconsistencies would not be dignified into broad liberality. It would not obtain countenance, and much less the applause for which the main actor in that incident sought for, and which he did obtain from many a quarter-- the Jewish press over clapping hands as to a triumph relieved over narrow-mindedness, just as if freedom from prejudice meant indifference to religious verities.
In like manner, the question of mixed marriages, now so vio--lently agitated in the west, so that a Rabbi wrote to permit non-Israelites to enter the house of Israel merely by the denial of a triune god; that question might be ventilated, leaving, of course, the pen as well as the speech always untramelled, but the practical application of a theory pregnant with misery to families would find insuferable hindrances in the Syna--gogue. The results of the absence of religious identity in the

contracting party, and the discordant education of the children--besides the destructive tendency to the cause of Monotheism, would be placed before the applicant, and the marriage would not be celebrated in the congregation of Jacob. Each Rabbi would be made to understand that "he is the teacher and not the legislator of the Congre--gation" of the Lord. I am glad to quote the last sentence of mine fro ma lecture just delivered by a Rabbi, who was wont to allow himself every latitude. I am doubly glad, because it required an immense deal of moral courage on his part so to speak. A father smarting under the severe stroke inflicted by a disobedient child who entered into an alliance prohibited by the spirit of the Mosaic laws, as we have read this morning "lest thou take of heathens' daughters unto thy sons, and when those daughters go astray after their gods, they make thy sons also go astray after their gods," an alliance, I say, forbid explicitly by God Ezra, made very stringent by a synod in the days of the Asmonean, and enforced by the Rabbis in subsequent ages, might have declined answering a query which opened afresh a painful wound. But he replied fairly and squarely, denouncing such marriages, and the ministers who dare defy a rule, which the

which the house of Israel--much to their happiness--have carried out through a long and wide dispersion.
Yes: the establishing of a Board of the character just described, might create a little order, where naught but chaos exists. I advocated it years ago, not in the expectation that my poor word would immediately effect the desirable end, but in the belief that my people would be set thinking; that they would finally demand of their ministers fixed rules for guidance, without depending on the crotchets of every one, whom a congregation blindly chooses. Perhaps the time is not ripe, but I have faith in the people. I cherish the hope that they will insist upon that or any wise measure, holding back the unscrupulous and reckless, purging the Synagogue of its defilements. As in the days of antiquity, a sprinkling of typical waters rehabilitated the polluted, and they kept in common the anniversary of the national birth, so will the tears of the righteous few have accomplished a purification. They will be the first drops of that limped fountain promised by God to be opened in our midst and from which Israel will receive purification. As Ezekiel wrote "I will sprinkle upon you clean water and you shall be cleaned from all your impurities, and from all your abominations will I cleanse you" And so may it be. Amen.

Identifier

p3xk8584v

identifier

SMBx10FF3_14