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Why were these people seeking a new home coming to Israel and not to America? Where had the American dream faltered? And he saw that Israel was right; it was taking people—any people—as America had once done; so that in fifty years the bright new ideas of the world would come probably from Israel and no longer from a tired America.
said, “How
Symphonies and cathedrals are not built by the children of upper-middle-class families. They’re built by the units we saw tonight. You need these people very much, Cullinane, but we can’t spare them and you’re too frightened to take them.”
The vulture, robbed of this promised meal, uttered a croaking cry of anger, then sought an ascending current, on which it rose in great circles to a height from which it was almost invisible to the herdsman in the brush at the edge of the desert, and then remembering past good fortune, it drifted effortlessly to the west, over green lands from which it had often feasted in earlier days, until it came to the mound of Makor, in whose town another contest between death and life was about to occur, involving more important characters than a stray donkey, and more complicated forces than a hungry
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subsided, as
They called him Elohim, all the gods; or Elyon, the most high; or El-Shaddai, the god almighty.
on
As for the manner of dispensing charity, he had formulated a rule which would be incorporated into the Talmud: “Take care of the other man’s body and your own soul.” If the worst drunkard came to him for food, Rabbi Asher first fed him, then prayed for him and sent him away. “Lecturing him about his evil ways should be postponed for another day,” he explained. “Charity and exhortation must not be mixed.”
“Rabbi Asher ha-Garsi told us: Antigonus the wily seller of olive oil used three tricks. He allowed sediment to gather in the bottom of his measure so that it contained less. At the time of judging he tilted the measure sideways. And he taught himself to pour so that a large bubble of air formed in the middle of his jug. At his death God judged him according to his own measure. The sediment of his sin nearly filled the jug. It was tilted so far to one side that most of eternity slipped from him. And that day God poured with such a bubble!”
Sometimes students would protest, “But you speak of God as if He were a human being, and yesterday you told us He is a spirit,” and the little rabbi would thunder, “Of course He’s a spirit. He has no body nor hands either. I’m telling you a story. Accept it as that.”
that jumbled, noise-crammed room where the Vodzher Rebbe huddled in the corner while his handful of furcapped Russian Jews worshiped in the undisciplined manner of the past. It was indeed—as Cullinane had once said—“like seventeen orchestras and no conductor,” but it was also a fundamental, haunting experience of the reality of God.
“My thought is that in those critical years Judaism went back to the basic religious precepts by which men can live together in a society, whereas Christianity rushed forward to a magnificent personal religion which never in ten thousand years will teach men how to live together.
“This week, Dom Miguel,” he tells me, “we can spare a little more,” and he takes from the box almost half of what he has earned. Hiding the coins in his long-coat he starts walking through the narrow streets, and wherever he finds a poor man, or a widow who has not with what to make Shabbat, he pauses and asks how this person is and as he talks he quietly places a few coins in some inconspicuous place. But when the meeting ends he always says, “Shmuel,
you are a man who bears misfortune with dignity. You must know God better than I do. Give me on this happy Friday your blessing,” and he makes the man feel that it is he who is doing the rabbi a favor. And thus he disposes of his wealth.
