Endurable

“I was like a pauper who moistens his dry crust with fewer tears if he assures himself that at any moment a total stranger is perhaps going to leave him his entire fortune. We are…

Today’s One-Liner (#179)

Anxiety about what I could  believe as certain gnawed at my heart all the more sharply as I grew  more and more ashamed that I had been misled and deluded by  promises of certainty for…

A Yiddish Counterculture

If you read enough of Peretz and the countless Yiddish writers who followed, a deeper vision begins to emerge: of a Jewishness infinitely more interesting, more challenging, and more relevant, rooted in tradition, shaped by…

Two Types

We observed that the wind always changed when Mrs. Pardiggle became the subject of conversation and that it invariably interrupted Mr. Jarndyce and prevented his going any farther, when he had remarked that there were…

Reading the Psalms

 How I cried out to you, my God, when I read the Psalms of David,  those hymns of faith, those songs of a pious heart in which the spirit  of pride can find no place!…

Today’s One-Liner (#177)

“I’d rather see a sermon lived than talked.” –An old woman from North Saint Louis, quoted by John Kavanaugh, The Word Encountered: Meditations on the Sunday Scriptures, 86

Effort

A professor had a wife who never had dinner ready on time and every day he had to sit around waiting.  Suddenly it occurred to him that he could utilize this time and he began…

Up to Marcel

I knew that my brain  was like a mountain landscape rich in minerals, wherein lay vast and varied ores of great price.  But should I have time to exploit them?  For two reasons I was…