Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion—its message becomes meaningless.

Awe rather than faith is the cardinal attitude of the religious Jew.

Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society.

It has not only detested beauty when produced at the price of justice; it has rejected the ritual when performed by the morally corrupted. Even religion itself, worship, was not considered to be an absolute. "Your prayers are an abomination," said Isaiah to the exploiters of the poor. Stay away from the synagogue, wrote the Gaon of Wilna to his household, if you cannot abstain from envy and gossiping about the dresses of your fellow attendants.

We must, furthermore, realize that the harsh passages in the Bible are only contained in describing actions which were taken at particular moments and stand in sharp contrast with the compassion, justice and wisdom of the laws that were legislated for all times.

Faith is vision, sensitivity and attachment to God; piety is an attempt to attain such sensitivity and attachment. The gates of faith are not ajar, but the mitsvah is a key. By living as Jews we may attain our faith as Jews. We do not have faith because of deeds; we may attain faith through sacred deeds. A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought.

The central commandment is in relation to the person. But religion today has lost sight of the person. Religion has become an impersonal affair, an institutional loyalty. It survives on the level of activities rather than in the stillness of commitment. It has fallen victim to the belief that the real is only that which is capable of being registered by fact-finding surveys.

That equality is a good thing, a fine goal, may be generally accepted. What is lacking is a sense of the monstrosity of inequality .

Above all it never ceases to proclaim that worship of God without justice to man is an abomination; that while man's problem is God, God's problem is man.

Philosophy of religion conducted in this manner, then, celebrates humility before the divine, since the awareness of God's overwhelming priority decenters us and puts us in our proper place.

Religion becomes sinful when it begins to advocate the segregation of God, to forget that the true sanctuary has no walls. Religion has always suffered from the tendency to become an end in itself, to seclude the holy, to become parochial, self-indulgent, self-seeking; as if the task were not to ennoble human nature but to enhance the power and beauty of its institutions or to enlarge the body of doctrines.

I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.