Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
Halachah and Aggadah
But must we conclude—as many think—that Halachah and Aggadah are two irreconcilable opposites?
Those who so conclude are confusing accident and form with substance; as who should declare the ice and…
Resolution Favoring Zionism
A convention of Orthodox Congregations met in New York, Wednesday, June 8, 1898. A resolution favoring Zionism was adopted.The principles of the convention adopted are as follows:This Conference of…
Ghetto Twilight
An infinite weariness comes into the faces of the old tenements,
As they stand massed together on the block,
Tall and thoughtful silent,
In the enveloping twilight.
Pensively,
They eye each other…
Day and Night
Day and night—
Shivering, we wait in bitter day
For moonlit night,
For the caressing moon.
Quivering, we wait in angry night—
For the sunlit day,
For the warming sun.
Day and night—
We must loom…
Transformation
Year after year, that cruel monster in the heart
growing, sense of guardedness expanding.
Year after year—generations’ blessing
gouged like a needle into the body.
I have wrenched it with irons…
Friends of My Age!
Friends of my age,
My happy generation,
We strode, pained-pleased,
Through the wreckage of whole worlds.
Before the living and the dead
fell on our portion
Inherited old skins
of ourselves—and…
A Series of Verses to the Venerable Ancient Whose Portrait Hangs in the Window of a Lottery Agency
The Avenida de Mayo
glows with a virginal light beneath the Sabbath sky.
That light strikes
the window pane that displays your portrait:
Laban amidst a flock of gaily colored lottery
tickets, green…
Tropic Nightmare in Singapore
Seven continents, seven seas,
and two and forty years—
and torrid equatorial nights
filled with nightmare fears.
Open eyes, naked heart.
And draining blood from me,
mosquitoes buzzing, buzzing…
The New World
A new world being made—one hears
In childhood that it has begun;
Then comes the passage of the years—
Is it not yet fully done?
The new world being made—always,
From childhood on—and on the day
The…
Lord I Have Seen Too Much
Lord, I have seen too much for one who sat
In quiet at his window’s luminous eye
And puzzled over house and street and sky,
Safe only in the narrowest habitat;
Who studies peace as if the world were…
The Oath
By these eyes that have seen the woe and grief,
their outcries heaving to my heart’s embrace,
by this compassion which taught me: forgive
till the time did come too awful for grace—
I have taken this…
On Frustrations and Prestidigitators
For the role of scapegoat, the prestidigitators chose Jews.
Rattling around in the recesses of their memory were recollections about how prewar governments in…