Peony

by Pearl S. Buck

Love must be taken on the tide, before it ebbs.”

Love is fleeting.

“Gods are what men make them,” Wang

The relationship between man and God

None on earth can love those who declare that they alone are the sons of God.”

Is this why Jews are persecuted?

“Here is the truth—I give it to you whole. We were a proud people. We lost our country. Our only hope for return was to keep ourselves a people. The only hope to keep ourselves a people was to keep our common faith in one God, a God of our own. That God has been our country and our nation. In sorrow and wailing and woe for all that we have lost has been our union. And our rabbis have so taught us, generation after generation.” “Nothing—except that?” David asked. His voice was strange and still. “For that many are willing to die,” Kao Lien said firmly. “Are you?” David demanded. “No,” Kao Lien said. David did not speak. His childhood was falling about him like a ruin, echoing through his memory in fragments of sacred days, his mother lighting the candles on Sabbath Eve; the sweet festival of lights, Hanukah, the beautiful Menorah, holding its eight candles at the window, reminding them of the great day when, conquered though they were, the Jews had won their fight to keep their own religion under the Syrian conquerors; Purim, the day when Jews remembered how they had fought against Haman, the ancient tyrant. And most of all he remembered his own special day, when he became a Son of the Commandment. “Are we to forget all that we are?” he asked Kao Lien at last, solemnly. “No,” Kao Lien said. “But we are to forget the past

How Jews stayed united

and separate ourselves no more. We are to live now, wherever we are, and we are to pour the strength of our souls into the peoples of the world.”

Don't separate from the rest of the world