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Once, at night, after the seven days of mourning, while I lay on the sacks dozing, someone came to me, the Evil One himself, and said to me, “Gimpl, why are you sleeping?”
“What should I be doing,” I…
You will assuredly regard it as wondrous, and it will gladden your heart that I too regarded as wondrous the vision vouchsafed to me by the Almighty in relation to the aliyot “ascents”—wondrous things…
That year my wife, Hannah, became extremely ill and one Sabbath she was in a coma and close to death. At night, at the conclusion of the Sabbath, we approached her to witness the departure of the…
19 August 1943
Today, dear Anka, is the anniversary of your Golgotha, tomorrow the anniversary of your death. A year has passed since I last saw you. You see, Anka, I do not believe in God and never…
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…
And thus it came to pass, and this was the beginning . . . Heavens tell me, why?
Tell me, why this, O why? What have we done to merit such disgrace?
The earth is dumb and…
My Lord, how stands it with me now
Who, standing here before you
(who, fierce as you are, are also just).
Cannot bow down. You order this.
Why, therefore, I must break
If bend I will not, yet bend I…
If my father had been able to foresee even a thousandth part of the trials I was to endure he might have been rather less ardent on the night my mother conceived me. . . . Now, of…
The fable tells us
that the Jews bought for themselves
a private place in hell.
In the first circle,
seated on a wooden bench,
Karl Marx fans himself with his hand.
The prophet Jeremiah
fights off…
Human follies, silver and gold and possessions,
Last only shortly on earth, and like flies, they fly away.
Wealth flowers like abundant grain, or like a tree’s boughs,
It bears recognizable fruit…