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Home  »  The Standard Book of Jewish Verse  »  The Spirit of Hebraism

Joseph Friedlander, comp. The Standard Book of Jewish Verse. 1917.

By From the Hebrew of Harry Wolfsohn (Trans. H. B. Ehrmann)

The Spirit of Hebraism

THEY tell me my spirit’s departed,

That my body of soul is bereft;

And that barren ’midst strangers I wander

And that no inspiration is left

But my vanishing fires ancestral

Where the last faint flashes are seen,

And that like to the poor and the stranger,

What is left by the world I glean.

They tell me, not knowing my Spirit

Like an ember that never grows cold,

Tho’ smouldering in its own ashes

Yet murmurs and grows as of old.

Oh, my Spirit awaits but my seeking

To burst like a spring from the soil,

And if once it be free from confinement

It will vest in all fruit of my toil.

It will live in the colors on canvas,

And survive in the hewn marble plan,

And in song and in music and story

To the last generation of man.

It will speak from the lips of new Prophets,

And their truth from the heights will be hurled,

From a model city of Justice

Where its flag will blazon unfurled.