ABSTRACT
According to some of the Rabbins, indeed, a man must not venture to put on the tephillin until he has read the Shemang. The test of the efficacy of religious ceremonial was the depth it added to a man’s spiritual life, the height to which it raised his moral stature. And the Gospels, while extolling heart religion, take good care to drive home the lesson by warnings against Rabbinic formalism. The rite of the tephillin is a conspicuous example. Legalists the Rabbins may have been, but formalists, in the sense of exalting the ceremonials of religion above the religious spirit, they certainly were not. But the Rabbins give another and a figurative interpretation of it with the object of enforcing a striking ethical lesson. Then the Jew would no longer bear the Lord’s Name in vain, no longer be impervious to the call of his highest traditions, his sublimest ideals.
