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.
The Dispersion of Israel
I have observed that on account of our many sins these days, very many Jews have…
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…
Instruction, Law, and Nation: A Critical Historical Inquiry into the Essence of Judaism
Since Judaism is law, the doubts of the Jewish youth are not an evil, at least per se they are not an evil. If Judaism were only instruction, the doubts raised by the instruction would…
Bar Mitzvah Sermon: On Jewish Education and Secularization
[ . . . ] Some [Jewish] people have children who may be likened to seeds, others who can be likened to vegetables, and yet others, to thorns. When parents raise their children in the ways of Torah…
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…
Grandfather Dying
Gray as a dove, toward evening, my grandfather came from the pasture;
He made up his bed and said a prayer of confession,
Then inwardly bade his farewell to the world
And closed his eyes, utterly…
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…