Yeshiva University - Masmid Yearbook (New York, NY)

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Eighteer MASMID have rendered thousands homeless and hungry, it seems almost a crime to divert funds for much- needed aid into the channels of education. Uni- versities and colleges all over the country have felt this attitude manifested in the tremendous de- cline of their income for running expenses. Yeshiva College has been no exception. The physical well-being of man is an essential component of progress. The advance of civiliza- tion has been marked by the gradual improvement of the living conditions of mankind. But always there has been recognized the underlying substratum of progress, the spiritual and intellectual develop- ment of the human mind. To this purpose the colleges of all ages have been dedicated ; and there has been no finer investment for the family of men than the continued support of thess centres of learning. A college progresses and expands in proportion to the facility with which it can meet its financial obligations. Thus, colleges of to-day live and grow on their endowments. Any college, which must resort to a hand to mouth policy for its support, must ultimately fail. By failure, I mean failure both in the necessary offices of careful supervision of a student ' s work and activities, failure in the disgruntled attitude of teachers who have not been compensated for their work, and failure in so far as the students themselves are affected by the precarious basis upon which their alma mater rests. In our own institution we have not yet reached so grave a pass. Our teachers are still enthusiastic, our students optimistic, and our ad- ministration actively interested in the individual work of each student. But an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and credit should be given to those far-sighted men who have so zealously ad- vocated the establishment of an endowment fund for the support of Yeshiva College. An endowment would not only insure the permanence of an in- stitution upon whose maintenance depends the fu- ture of Judaism in this country, but it would offer the basis for that necessary expansion and growth which would make of Yeshiva College what it should be and what we hope it will be — one of the great unversities of the world. A beginning has already been made and several men have given liberally of their time and money for the development of this project. There has been organized the Yeshiva Endowment Fund, Inc., whose purpose is to interest men in patron- izing Yeshiva College, as well to supervise the investment of the money that has already been contributed. Every effort should be bent in this direction. Therein lies salvation; therein lies ex- pansion; therein lies the future of Judaism in America.

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M A S M I D w THE TRAGEDY OF GERMANY History is replete with the shattered illusions of mankind. Monuments of majestic splendor have been conjured up out of the fertility of the human mind to bask in the warm rays of specious reality and then fade into the ephemeral realm of lost dreams. The most recent of these fallen idols is the much-vaunted epitome of human progress — Deutsche Kultur. A Hegel might, with self-right- eous ingenuity, place Teutonic civilization as the synthesis of all human effort, but we, of this day and age, may, with even more righteous indigna- tion, assign to a civilization productive of a Hitler the ignominious position of antithesis to all that is noble and worthwhile in the lofty aspirations of civilized man. Persecution of the Jew is not a new nor an unusual phenomenon. It has been the peculiar fate of the Jew to receive the scorpion-like stings of Fate in far greater measure than any other race. The sharp crack of the whip and the corporal scourge of fire and sword are more the rule than the exception in Jewish history. Why, then, has the conscience of civilized man been aroused to so sudden a pitch of universal condemnation by the recent atrocities perpetrated by the present German government? We of the present generation have regarded, with increasing interest and hope, the efforts of those altruistic souls whose lives have been devoted to the stamping out of intolerance and the main- tenance of world peace. We have seen a League of Nations flower from the blood-drenched fields of the late war. We have heard denunciations of intolerance and discrimination voiced from the pul- pits of all denominations, from the convention halls of all sorts of organizations, from the public fora of every land. Barbarism had been, but more. The dream has ended, as all dreams do. And in its wake has come disillusionment. Germany has betrayed the hopes of mankind. Political, eco- nomic, and social isolation would have been a blow sufficiently devastating of the lives of the six hun- dred thousand Jews in Germany. But Germany ' s return to medieval barbarism stamps her culture as a sham, her refinement as camouflage, and her sense of right and wrong as so horribly perverted that the tortures of a Torquemada were tolerated in twentieth-century Berlin. ould that those Jews were alive, who so confidently and arrogantly proclaimed that from Germany goes forth the Torah and the word of the Lord from Berlin. Once again we are brought face to face with the inevitable reality. Poultices and compresses are mere temporary balsam to the harassed and lacerated body of the Jew. One road of promise is open — the road to Palestine, the national Jewish homeland. THE NEED FOR AN ENDOWMENT Life beckons to another fleck of college grad- uates. Though its welcoming gestures seem rather weary and mechanical, still youth needs no second invitation. Depressions may come and go. but the search for knowledge goes on forever. At a time when all about us the effects of economic stress

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M A S M I D , in U ■ ■ Pro me it he us Or Tantalus? Ernest Rap i iai l Shall man ' s hopes repose softly upon saffron cushions of a blissful Heaven, or shall ihcy toss feverishly upon the hard bed of an implacable Nature? Is man a child of the gods, or a chance wanderling in lonely space? Is consciousness, as the idealist contends, the architect of the universe, or merely a throbbing impulse in a world of atomic disturbances? In a word, is man a Prometheus in possession of divine secrets, or a Tantalus con- demned forever to reach but never to grasp? The medieval age — that dismal chasm where sophistry and error lay in fond embrace — evolved a most ingenious solution to these perplexing prob- lems. Man was the noblest of all creations. His life was a mortal conflict between good and evil, a conflict that terminated in eternal bliss or eternal damnation. In the vaulted heaven, man read the glory of an omnipotent G-d, and in the sulphurous gases escap ing from the yawning jaws of volcanic mountains he fancied the faint traces of Purgatory. The earth on which he lived was but an island suspended in soace, midway between a glorious heaven and a torturous hell. In the sixteenth century, the investigations of Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler threatened man ' s monarchical pretensions, and shook the medieval structure to its very foundation. Man fought against his dethronement with the ferocity of an animal at bay, and in G-d ' s name he persecuted Galileo and burned Giordano Bruno at the stake. But with the triumph of reason, man was compelled to give up the medieval Paradise woven out of the tenuous threads of dialectic, together with the multi-shaped mirrors of phantasy in which man had often surveyed his exaggerated beauty and importance. A universe of law and order suc- ceeded a universe ruled by divine petulance and discrimination. A materialistc perspective was in- troduced into the investigations of Nature, a per- spective thai received il mo I eulogi tic, though declamatory, expre ion in the work of I lolbach. For the preservation ol man ' privihs cd portion in the universe there were two avenues of escape. The first, suggested by Pomponazzi, urged tin- sharp distinction between reason and religion. Reason, and its handmaid philosophy, became con- cerned with logical investigations in the secular realm, while religion with its theological d • was placed beyond the pale of proof into the realm of belief. For reason to seek theologic consecra- tion was abusrd; for theology to offer rational proof for its propositions was fantastic. Thus Pompon.i i declared immortality of the soul to be logically insoluble, but solemnly affirmed it as an article of faith. Logically, it may be observed in passing, this approach was a return to the Tertullian doc- trine, Credo quia absurdum; and historically it marked the breakdown of scholastism. viz.. ' he effort to establish the rational nature of theological propositions. The second avenue of escape, as observed in the writings of Boehme, involved the sharp dualism of the visible and the invisible worlds. Beneath the surface of visible things there is concealed a deep mystery, which is unravelled by the soul through mystical revelation. Though Boehme re- affirmed many of the propositions of theology, we cannot fail to catch glimpses of his liberation from the vagaries of mediaeval scholasticism. Science cannot, according to Boehme. dislodge religion from its venerable cosition. On the contrary, the drvrne Spirit dwells in the body of nature, as the soul dwells in the body of man. But any cosmological dualism, as Paulsen has pointed out, when carried to its logical conclusion reduces itself to monism or at best to pantheism, and consequently we need not be surprised to find Boehme occasionally equating God and nature. The pantheisim. feebly