You Gentiles
cance to the fable (the practice of interpreting fables psychologically is, as a rule, a dishonest one), but quote it as a handy illustration. We are not free to choose and to reject, to play, to construct, to refine. We are a dedicated and enslaved people, predestined to an unchangeable relationship. Freedom at large was not and is not a Jewish ideal. Service, love, consecration, these are ideals with us. Freedom means nothing to us: freedom to do what?
Yet in glimpses I understand the charm of your life and sometimes lose myself in the fascination of your Plato's dream. Such a world as he foreshadows, a world of sunlight, exercise, singing, fantasy: a world of graceful and elastic bodies, of keen, flashing minds, of clash and effort, wars and heroes and monuments, a life wheeling and dashing in splendid formations, rejoicing under free and lovely skies: a life without brooding and gloom, without the intolerable burden of this unrelaxing immanence. Man and man's effort, man's love and agonies are ends in them-
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