Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Lost Prayer

While the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer is known for his sacrilegious literary treatments of Jews and Judaism—a ḥasidic typesetter was so offended by the novel Enemies: A Love Story that he destroyed the manuscripts—some of his nonfiction and unpublished works show a different attitude. One indication of this attitude is a short personal prayer, composed in Hebrew and scrawled on the back of a receipt in or around 1952. David Stromberg, whose translation (with some minor adjustments) is excerpted below, speculates that the prayer reflected a slow “return to religion” Singer undertook in the early 1950s.

In contrast to Singer’s Yiddish prose—which is in every way striking, employs a rich and varied vocabulary, and always seems to wink ironically at the reader—the prayer’s Hebrew is simple and sincere, drawing on the standard liturgical tropes and phrases. But its deviations from theological expectations are, therefore, all the more intriguing:

Master of the Universe, fill my heart with love for the Jewish people, and rest for the soul.

Let me see the Creator in each and every creature, and His mercy for each thing He creates.

There’s not a single drop of water or particle of dust in which Your light is lacking, or that is outside your domain. . . .

Though we may not know the purpose of life, or why You sent us into this world to suffer, we understand that it is our duty to build and not to destroy, to comfort and not to torment, to bring joy rather than sorrow to Your creatures.

There is only one joy: to increase and not to lessen the world’s joy. Seek happiness, but not on account of your neighbors or family, for you are they and they are you; you are brethren, children of God.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Judaism, Prayer, Yiddish literature

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023