and murmurs in Yiddish, “It is God’s will.” I have envied the profound peace of many of these aged students living in the past and undisturbed by thoughts of the future. Their Jewish view of life is as beautiful as it is simple. It disregards neither earth nor heaven. It looks to earth and observes the evil prevailing among men; it thinks of heaven and ponders on the bliss of “the future state,” and it urges man to strive to bring heaven on earth, to establish by justice and equity those blessed conditions on earth which so many associate with heaven.
Their Jewish view of death is equally beautiful. For those who die they feel no sorrow. Having once torn aside the veil which parts the known and the unknown, having once entered into the shadow, or rather the sunshine, of the beyond, they are better off in the other life. Whether death means eternal sleep or eternal life, those who have left our side, having passed into the arms of pitiless death, repose in a condition which should give survivors no cause for anxiety on account of their beloved dead.
In the pathetic chapter of “The Old Curiosity Shop,” in which Dickens tells of the death of Little Nell, he makes the Schoolmaster utter these words of wisdom, on which all who mourn for their dead may well ponder. “If,” said he, “one deliberate wish expressed in solemn terms above the bed could call her back to life, which of us would utter it?”
Dickens took this view of death from the Talmud.
The interpretation of a difficult passage from the Talmud, or the coining of an epigram, is as food and wine to the wise old students, and there is not an ill in their lives that cannot be soothed or a blessing that cannot be acknowledged in a quotation from their beloved book. To watch them at their study and devotions undisturbed by the turmoil about them is to marvel at the faith which has enabled some of them to live more than one hundred years with no other interest in life than their God and their books.