The Jewish consciousness is the spiritual force that keeps the Jew alive as a member of his own people. It is unique among the spiritual forces of the world, for no nation has so remarkable a past or has so variegated a present. No other nation has been divorced from its land for nineteen centuries and continued to preserve its national identity; but Israel has survived amid all the corroding forces of ceaseless dispersion. The power that has animated the Jew in this victorious struggle against the elements of destruction, embracing in varying degree and proportion his family instinct, his religious zeal, his pride of race, his national solidarity, is that which we understand as the Jewish consciousness. It may still be potent in the soul of the man who is out of sympathy with the synagogue; it may even be feeble in him for whom religion is only a combination of stereotyped prayers and meaningless customs. But it is vital in him who realizes "the rock that bore" him and clings 2unto it.

The Jewish consciousness is keenest in him whose mind is filled with the knowledge of his people's past. Those to whom the generations uniting the last days of Judea's independence with our own times are as an uncharted sea cannot feel the reality and significance of Jewish being; those who know nought of the wanderings and vicissitudes of their ancestors, of their piety in persecution, of their racial pride under humiliation, of their intellectual fires that illumined the Ghetto, of their achievements in suffering, of their triumph over intolerance, and of their indomitable belief in the day of their national regeneration--they cannot have anything but a dim and feeble notion of the meaning of the Jew and the message of Judaism.

The Jewish consciousness is best cultivated in a Jewish environment, in a Jewish home, with an intelligent father and a devoted mother. The impressions of childhood may not always be the most precious, for parents vary, but they are certainly the most lasting; and so the links of the great chain of tradition, 3which binds the modern Jew to his forefathers who witnessed and wept at the fall of the Temple, are forged most strongly when the mind is tender and malleable. But paternal example, even when most exemplary, is not enough for the young Jew to withstand all the unknown temptations of the modern world. His mind must be steeled and strengthened by a study of his people's history. In the adolescent craving for intellectual freedom, he may perhaps be repelled by the synagogue if the rites of worship seem to him to degenerate into a worship of rites; but when all his passion for freedom is gratified he cannot fail to be stirred by the annals of his people to a view of pride in all that they have suffered and wrought, to a feeling of kindship with a chosen race.

Only if the Jewish consciousness is thus informed with knowledge can it become an active and beneficent force, for how can you appeal to a Jew to be worthy of the past if he is ignorant of the past? The Jewish consciousness must be confined to sterile retrospection. It demands, apart from a high standard of civic conduct, the fullest self-realization of the Jewish personality--willing service to the community, sympathetic aid for brethren oppressed, and zealous 4co-operation in the task of national salvation.

Never did the Jewish consciousness receive so powerful a stimulus as from the call to work for the upbuilding of the Land of Israel. It has been roused and revivified throughout all the Jewries in the world. It has been quickened into an active making for the betterment of Israel's national work. But it has still to be raised to a higher degree of potentiality before Israel can worthily enter upon his heritage in his ancestral land.