The Book of Delight, and other papersAbrahams, Israel
Religion
The Book of Delight, and other papers
Abrahams, Israel
Ibn Zabara, Joseph ben Meir, 1140?- Sefer sha'ashu'im; Jews -- Intellectual life; Love poetry, Hebrew -- History and criticism
One such letter-writer tells sadly how he walked through the market at
Zion, thought of the past, and only kept back his tears lest the Arab
onlookers should see and ridicule his sorrow. Yet another medieval
letter-writer, Nachmanides, reaches the summit of sentiment in these lines,
which I take from Dr. Schechter's translation: "I was exiled by force from
home, I left my sons and daughters; and with the dear and sweet ones whom I
brought up on my knees, I left my soul behind me. My heart and my eyes will
dwell with them forever. But O! the joy of a day in thy courts, O
Jerusalem! visiting the ruins of the Temple and crying over the desolate
Sanctuary; where I am permitted to caress thy stones, to fondle thy dust,
and to weep over thy ruins. I wept bitterly, but found joy in my tears."
And with this thought in our mind we will take leave of our subject. It is
the traveller who can best discern, amid the ruins wrought by man, the hope
of a Divine rebuilding. Over the heavy hills of strife, he sees the coming
dawn of peace. The world must still pass through much tribulation before
the new Jerusalem shall arise, to enfold in its loving embrace all
countries and all men. But the traveller, more than any other, hastens the
good time. He overbridges seas, he draws nations nearer; he shows men that
there are many ways of living and of loving. He teaches them to be
tolerant; he humanizes them by presenting their brothers to them. The
traveller it is who prepares a way in the wilderness, who makes straight in
the desert a highway for the Lord.
THE FOX'S HEART
Pliny says that by eating the palpitating heart of a mole one acquires the
faculty of divining future events. In "Westward Ho!" the Spanish prisoners
beseech their English foe, Mr. Oxenham, not to leave them in the hands of
the Cimaroons, for the latter invariably ate the hearts of all that fell
into their hands, after roasting them alive. "Do you know," asks Mr. Alston
in the "Witch's Head," "what those Basutu devils would have done if they
had caught us? They would have skinned us, and made our hearts into _mouti_
[medicine] and eaten them, to give them the courage of the white man." Ibn
Verga, the author of a sixteenth century account of Jewish martyrs, records
the following strange story: "I have heard that some people in Spain once
brought the accusation that they had found, in the house of a Jew, a lad
slain, and his breast rent near the heart. They asserted that the Jews had
extracted his heart to employ it at their festival. Don Solomon, the
Levite, who was a learned man and a Cabbalist, placed the Holy Name under
the lad's tongue. The lad then awoke and told who had slain him, and who
had removed his heart, with the object of accusing the poor Jews. I have
not," adds the author of the _Shebet Jehudah_, "seen this story in writing,
but I have heard it related."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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