“I have looked this year and last for something in your paper about the prayer which the Jews say at their New Year. But you say nothing. Can it be you have not heard of the Kol Nidre?”
“Lately in three cities I have heard a Jewish religious hymn sung in the public theaters. This was in New York, Detroit and Chicago. Each time the program said ‘by request.’ Who makes the request? What is the meaning of this kind of propaganda? The name of the hymn is ‘Eli.’”
The Jewish year just passed has been described by a Jewish writer in the Jewish Daily News as the Year of Chaos. The writer is apparently intelligent enough to ascribe this condition to something besides “anti-Semitism.” He says, “the thought that there is something wrong in Jewish life will not down,” and when he describes the situation in the Near East, he says, “The Jew himself is stirring the mess.” He indicts the Jewish year 5681 on 12 counts, among them being, “mismanagement in Palestine,” “engaging in internal warfare,” “treason to the Jewish people,” “selfishness,” “self-delusion.” “The Jewish people is a sick people,” cries the writer, and when he utters a comfortable prophecy for the year 5682, it is not in the terms of Judah but in terms of “Kol Yisroel”—All Israel—the terms of a larger and more inclusive unity which gives Judah its own place, and its own place only, in the world. The Jewish people are sick, to be sure, and the disease is the fallacy of superiority, with its consequent “foreign policy” against the world.
When Jewish writers describe the year 5681 as the Year of Chaos, it is an unconscious admission that the Jewish people are ripening for a change