Shulamith Hareven Quotes

One has to love, Sara, she says softly, one has to love, human beings are so pitiful, we can't prevent a single death, all we can do is stave it off a little. Give comfort. "That's what Dr. Bimbi says too, but he sees that staving off as a sign of human strength." "Oh, no," Thérèse recoils. "Human beings have no strength. We live like flowers, by the grace of God." (chapter 7 p146)

Sara, attuned to the vibrating city, went back to work. Not to the hospital: the thought of that great dungeon of suffering oppressed her. She looked for, and found, a job as a field worker, visiting needy homes on welfare all over the city. The work came to several hours a day. She was usually paired with another nurse, a Christian Arab named Thérèse. Neither of them had known before what depths of misery there were in the city, what poverty holed up in burrows, buried in mildew, stirring amid the huge stones covered with slobber and moss. An age-old underworld of poverty. Holes in the walls. Stinking puddles on the ground. (chapter 7 p144)

An ocean of music foams through him in great waves and keeps on going. (about Tony Crowther, chapter 6 p130)

"The first child forces you to define yourself," he said. "When the second comes, you're already defined. Not just as a parent. Whatever you are and aren't, you can be sure that's what your child will learn to demand from you. I was very critical of my own father from an early age. (Elias, chapter 5 p111)

Her laugh is like slivers of sunlight. (about Hulda, chapter 3 p40)

The sounds of a small city. As small as a man's palm. (chapter 2 p22)

Sara's father, never having met Morality, had perhaps been exempted from it. Even in Jerusalem of the early century, which was a warm-hearted city of warm-hearted quarters, Don Isaac Amarillo was considered an exceptionally warm-hearted man, unable to resist the general sweetness of things, such as the pure breeze that blew down the oboes of the alleyways when the day's heat suddenly broke, driving before it sun-bronzed women, all colors of children, smells of jasmine crying out loud in Arab courtyards from an abundance of evening, a dusty shepherd returning from the fields of Nikophoria with a new lamb on his arm, a fragrance of arak, thyme, and repose. At such times his defenses were down, tears of utter helplessness flooded his good-natured, near-sighted eyes, any baby could bowl him over; he was capable of giving away all he possessed, his own soul, had anyone requested it, tying it in his not always immaculate handkerchief, and bestowing. One might compare him then to a big, kind Gulliver with a horde of children perched on his hat brim, tweaking his ears to make him run and stamping their feet on his forehead for the fun of it. And when summertime came, bringing the wild red rut of watermelons piled high in the market by the Jaffa Gate, along the path that led down to Hebron Road from the Old City wall, he was at the mercy of the first woman who came along. (first lines)

The peace must not be seen as a peace of industrialists and yuppies; it must not be seen as a peace between people in suits who have Philippine maids, on the backs of, and over the heads of those who are referred to too clinically as the “lower tenth percentiles”—in simple Hebrew, the have-nots.

The boundaries which will determine our future are not geographic...The true boundary is, rather, the knowledge that there is a limit to power. The respect which we need will not come through conquest by the sword: it can be obtained only through respect for others. Our ultimate hope is not for the undivided land of Israel, but for an Israel which is undivided in spirit and at peace with itself.