Page 205 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Old age and the future

The Jew lived amongst tribes who were in a low state of culture;
when they suffered from the natural elements or diseases, they tried
to appease the unknown shadows that they thought were afflicting
them. In due time, some of them found that they could profit, to
their own miserable advantage, from the others’ fear, so they devised
a system to make both themselves and the others believe that they
had the power to intervene with those unknown shadows by
executing sacrifices. Moses, brought up in the court of the pharaohs
in Egypt—who were more advanced in culture than any other tribes
of that period—learned from them and developed his own thinking
to a high degree. The fundamental laws and ethics that we read in the
Book of Moses force us to admit that he was the best man this world
of ours has had. He was born the natural human way, his laws and
ethics were natural to humans then and today, and he died the natural
way that every human does.
But Moses had to prescribe some animal sacrifices and ceremonies
and other absurd things which seem to us today childish and savage,
because men were in a primitive state in those times. They sacrificed
children to Moloch and Astarte, and practiced many other cruel and
immoral systems of worship. Moses, to wean the Jews away from
those things, had to give them a temple with priests, sacrifices of
animals, and other habits of their neighbor nations, as attractions to
make them rotate around the monotheistic idea. When the Jews were
more advanced in mind, the prophets came and spoke out in a clearer
tone, condemning the sacrifices and demanding from men a purer
ethic.
Isaiah tells them in the name of God, “I am full of the burnt
offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the
blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats.” Instead, he says,
“Learn to do well; seek judgement, relieve the oppressed, judge the
fatherless, plead for the widow.” In a similar tone speak Micah,
Amos, and the rest of the prophets. Human progress is moving step
by step, inch by inch, not by rail speed or jet speed; only by a very
slow process. Big rich, tall ornamental church buildings today are like
the sacrifices of old, holding the infantile human mind, drawing men
in to rotate around this moral center, so they do not get into other
mischief.
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