The Dovekeepers

by Alice Hoffman

Everywhere I walked my fate walked with me, sewn to my feet with red thread.

All that will ever be has already been written long before it happens. There is nothing we can do to stop it.

I would have been willing to do anything for the glory of God as I walked through the gate, except forgive Him for what I had lost.

I knew what it was to yearn for a life so distant it seemed that it had never been anything more than a dream.

It is possible to speak without words, to know another creature’s wants and desires though there is only silence. That was my lesson to learn, my fate all along.

Nothing in this world is lasting, only our faith lives on.

Our rest is formed by our waking life and our waking life is formed by our sorrows.

But now I understood that, although words were God’s first creation, silence was closer to His divine spirit, and that prayers given in silence were infinitely greater than the thousands of words men might offer up to heaven.

for some secrets bring you closer in their sharing, just as others break you apart.

I was not certain that our lives were so similar to thread, able to be unspooled, then gathered up again.

still, anyone who trusts a serpent deserves its bite. The wise see a creature for what it is, not what it says it may be.

He wanted pain, I saw that in him, and what a man wants he will often manage to find.

but in battle you cannot tell another when it is his time to enter the World-to-Come, nor is it possible to keep any man in this world when he wishes to leave it behind.

Her great beauty was eclipsed only by her great knowledge.

the kedeshah. They embraced the feminine aspect of God, the Dwelling, the deep place where inspiration abided, for in the written words of God, compassion and knowledge were always female.

“Here is the riddle of love: Everything it gives to you, it takes away.”

I must keep my head and not give in to desire, for desire is what causes women to drown.

The wickedness of the world was a part of creation, I knew this, and the Angel of Death had been created on that day when life first appeared, yet I was embittered. I wept for what I had lost and what the world had lost and would yet lose again.

But what we are given is taken as well, so that we know God’s glory comes to us from His will alone.