I am a Jew

B”H

I will continue to hold my banner aloft. I find myself [born] into a people and a religion.
The preservation of my people must for be for a purpose, for G-d does nothing without a purpose.
His reasons are unfathomable to me, but on my own reason I find little dependence; test it where I will, it fails me.
The simple, the ultimate in every direction is sealed to me.
It is as difficult to understand matter as mind.
The courses of the planets are no harder to explain than the growth of a blade of grass.
Therefore I am willing to remain a link in the great chain.
What has been preserved for four thousand years was not saved that I should overthrow it.
My people have survived the prehistoric paganism, the Babylonian polytheism, the aesthetic Hellenism, the sagacious Romanism; and it will survive the modern dilettantism and the current materialism, holding aloft the traditional Jewish ideals inflexibly until the world shall become capable of recognizing their worth.

(Source: “I am a Jew”, the Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book. USCJ, 1946 (reprinted 1964), p. 304.