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A fountain surges from my verse’s house.
Its flowing waters quench the thirst of men—
A fountain from the rock of perfect rhyme,
With waters cold to please the yearning man—
A flow unending…
Monelle grew quiet and looked at me:
I came from the night, she said, and I shall return to the night. For I too am a young prostitute.
And Monelle said again:
I pity you, I pity you, my love.
Even…
The sum of suffering is greater
Than the sum of happiness.
That’s what a philosopher said
Long ago, years and years.
The waves of suffering wash away
Happiness’s tiny isle.
The bridge of suffering…
Queen Esther said to herself What is there to fear? We move in our orbits like the stars.
But in the night looking at the black fields and river she could not help thinking of Vashti’s white cheeks…
For Zishe Landau
Quiet, quiet, no loud talk!
Stand bent over, pale and dark,
Crouched up in a ball of pain,
Shut up—holding your breath in.
Out of the deep night
He’ll ride up on a white horse
Hear…
This map, in a manuscript copy of Be’er mayim ḥayim (A Spring of Living Water), a commentary on Rashi published in Worms or Friedberg in the late fifteenth or sixteenth century, is based on Rashi’s…
The Jewish Cemetery at Ouderkerk is one of Jacob van Ruisdael’s better-known works. Purchased for use by the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish congregation in Amsterdam in 1641, the cemetery holds twenty…
In the Sephardic tradition, a “marriage contract” (ketubah), a symbolic betrothal of God and Israel, is read before the Torah reading on the first day of the holiday of Shavuot
Ḥad Gadya (One Little Goat) is a song customarily sung at the end of the Passover seder. It recounts a sequence of events beginning with a young goat purchased by the protagonist’s father that is then…
The fire of joy in solitude. . . And since in vain I have made this journey,The ground giving way to my burning steps,Let me embrace this ardorIn abstract revelry* * *