Pickering College - Voyageur Yearbook (Newmarket, Ontario Canada)

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The Voyageur A grave anxiety is mine that such manifestation of prejudices, even against 'fthe least of our fellows is the first infallible sign of that insidious disease which brought the German Reich to its present madness and has plunged all mankind into gory war. If anti-Semitism, as the great non- Jewish author Thomas Mann phrased it, is the bomb which the Nazis have cast over our fence to disrupt the camp of democracy, we had better cast that devastating bomb utterly from our hearts if we would present that united front to the foe which alone can see us through. Every facet and fraction in our variegated Canadian mosaic must join not alone hand to hand, but heart to heart and spirit to spirit in this consuming crusade upon which we are now engaged, in which, in every truth we shall, we must hang together or we will hang, or rather, be hanged separately and completely. But there is a third manner of tool which is sorely needed to vouchsafe us the victory for which we so ardently pray and yearn. And I believe the great Prime Minister of Great Britain, reared as he has been upon our Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, would be the first to confess with the prophet Isaiah, 'Gif ye have no faith, then all -your bombing-planes and submarines and tanks and ships, notwithstanding, Gaye will not enduref' Faiths, philosophies, points of view do make a difference, despite all our latter-day scolfers. And this victory which we seek will not be won by any life-is-just-a-bowl-of-cherries cynicism. No supercilious scorner can be our fellow-traveller upon this consecrated crusade. Only those with a deep and abiding faith and trust, such as characterizes those valorous souls, who, like unto the Christian and Jewish martyrs of old, crouch bravely in their darkened air-raid shelters and yet lustily chant HO Cod our Help in Ages Past, Our Hope in Days to Come can buttress our flagging spirits with the morale requisite for victory. Even the pagan devotees of Thor and Wotan declare, in the words of Ewald August Banse, the high priest of lVIars and outstanding Nazi tactician: uvvar is an affair of morale in which the side with the stouter heart succeeclsf, A wiser and more pious age, however, was not ashamed to call that affair of morale and stout heart the faith by which alone men and nations may live and not die. Where is such a faith to be found today? I would be the last to declare that it is to be found only within the church or synagogue. Especially in the synagogue and church as we know them today, altogether too pathet- ically abandoned by vast multitudes of men, their erstwhile glory reduced in the sight of too many to but a Hbrief code for mating, a bit of castor oil for the ailing, and a few seemly words at the gravef' And yet, potentially at least, I know of no other institution in contemporary life so surcharged with possible power and moral dynamic as is the historic synagogue or church, no surer bomb-shelter for our harassed and harried spirit. Truly, a church which taught a large part of mankind to walk upright and unafraid through one dark age may yet summon up the power to prevent another dark age from descending upon us, or to face it, should it come, with unwavering faith and courage. To your tents then, O Israel, to your taber- nacles, O Christendom, that with the uwhole armour of God,'7 with might and power, but not with might and power alone, but with the spirit of unity and the resoluteness of faith, we may, in truth, provide the tools that all of us together may finish the job. 17

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The Voyageur The Strategy of Faith Abstract of an Address Delivered at Pickering College, May 18, 1941 By RABBI MAURICE N. EISENDRATH OT YET have we really answered Wvinston Churchill's desperate appeal, - first voiced many months ago and passionately reiterated in his most recent world-wide radio broadcast for the tools, the tools, the tools, in order that those heroic souls across the sea might finish the job. We have not as yet learned the meaning of the word sacrifice-our seemingly staggering new budget notwithstanding. Our lives are still comparatively untouched in glaring contrast to those who for so many slow-trudging days and hideous nights have been enduring, for us, so much toil and sweat and tears and blood. We grumble about increased taxation, a movie less, a second-hand car, while vast multitudes have been rendered homeless, their very last possession shattered before their very eyes, their loved ones torn from 'their embrace. A Canadians too must learn to strip ourselves, not next week or next year, but NOW of their every needless luxury, of their every superfluous possession, even of many unnecessary comforts, of our booze and our jazz particularly, in order to provide those tools for victory, those tools that might enable those most valourous souls which history has yet beheld to fin- ish the job, lest, before we realize what has befallen us, we ourselves will be finished, UTTERLY, INEXORABLY FINISHED. lf the budget brought down just a few days ago is requisite to-day, is it conceivable that it was not just as direly needed yesterday? Was it then because we were not prepared for such so-called sacrifices then, that we demand of our leaders that they shall spoon-feed us and prepare us ever so gradually by such homeopathic doses? And does it not follow that even greater demands which will be exacted of us to-morrow are actually required to-day? Shall we, then, be the archi- tects of our own downfall? Shall we be the co-conspirators of our own ruin? Must we too be guilty of that lamentable refrain, QTOO LITTLE AND TOO LATEM because we have not the courage to face unflinchingly the cost, be-cause, while others gladly relinquish their lives we will not surrender our material goods to sustain their hands with the indispensable physical and military tools so indispensable for even the bravest heart to win 'through to victory? No miserly spirit can triumph in this hour of decision. For our enemies are anything but misers. They take by force-as we should give with a free and willing heart-everything which their peoples have and hold and dare to gamble it on this single throw of the dice which, should they win, will wipe out all our greedily grasped possessions. Nor can we hope to subdue the solid phalanx which our foe presents so long as the slightest vestige of our erstwhile divisions of race, religion, class or creed set us apart one from the other. It has been by the centuries' old tactic of '6Divide and Rulew that the Nazis came to power first of all in their own land, and then in the country after country which they marked out for conquest and which their treacherous trojan termites prepared for the slaughter. We in Canada dare not permit the sly and subtle and scheming fifth-columnists, not yet altogether purged from our bosom, to set province against province, Protestant against Catholic, French against English, capital against labour, Christian against Jew. 16

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The Voyageur DICK MILNE ED. MINCHINTON THEODORE RISING To these three, in proud memory, We dedicate this page . . . H glfur Cgreaier 'finite hath nn man..- Dick Milne Ed. Minchinton Theodore Rising They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn, At the going flown of the sun anal in the morning We will remernber them. I 8