Back To, Forward From, Ahad Ha'am?

This chapter asks what is living, and what is dead, in Ahad Ha'am. By ‘living’, the chapter refers to what is living for us; by ‘dead’, what is dead for us. In the volume Tradition and Change, which on the development of the Conservative movement in the Jewry of the United States, there is excerpted an address by the present Vice-Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in which the first of the ‘four tested standards’ of the movement is declared to be ‘scientific knowledge of the whole of Judaism’. But even after the ‘whole of’ Judaism has become known scientifically, there still remains the task of its evaluation. Evaluation is not the business of science. Science describes; it does not judge. But life means judgement, discrimination, and selection. There are subjects and opinions which for us today are more significant than others and it is these which we have to look out for. The chapter thus considers the contemporary significance of Ahad Ha'am, and, having found it, how and where one can go on further.