“A perpetual fire shall keep burning on the altar. It shall not go out.”
Roger closed the book that he had been reading to Lizzie, and he looked down. The reading light turned his daughter’s curls into waves of gold, and cast shadows of lace onto her cheek.
”Thus the goat shall carry on it all their iniquities, to an inaccessible region, and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness”
Greg Porter brought a folding chair and cafe table out onto the balcony of his little Piedmont apartment.
”A fracture for a fracture, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – as he has maimed a human being, so shall he be maimed.
The greatest piece of music ever written in the history of the universe is of course the Bach Double Concerto for Two Violins in D minor. Surely, you of all people agree.
”Should a man set aside a votieve offering in the value fixed for persons to the Lord, the value for the male from twenty years old up to sixty years old shall be fifty shekels…”
Caitlin had sometimes wondered what Taylor might look like with his shirt off. Now she found out.
”Count the heads of all the community of the Israelites by their clans, by their fathers’ houses, according to the number of names, every male by their heads.”
“Latrine duty AGAIN? Why do you give latrine duty to me and rob every single week?”
”Any party whose wife has… had carnal relations with her unbeknown to her husband…that party shall bring his wife to the priest… And in the priest’s hands shall be the water of bitterness that induces the spell…. Once he has made her drink the water—if she has defiled herself by breaking faith with her husband, the spell-inducing water shall enter into her to bring on bitterness, so that her belly shall distend and her thigh shall sag; and the wife shall become a curse among her people.”
“Oh, boy, I think I gotta be goin’. Last night Jennifer and I celebrated our anniversary. We went out to a two-star Michelin restaurant, gorged ourselves on food and wine, had a great evening alone together, and now I’m paying the price.”
And Moses said to the Lord, “Why have You done evil to Your servant, and why have I not found favor in Your eyes, to put the burden of all this people upon me?”
When New York arts journalists asked “The Prophet”, Vic Fine, what dreams he had for his theater company, his stock answer was “My hope is that it flourishes and can touch as many hearts as possible.” Vic’s wife Hannah knew that what Vic really wanted was to shut the whole thing down.
”And they put forth an ill report to the Israelites of the land that they had scouted saying ‘The land through which we passed to scout is a land that consumes those who dwell in it, and all the people whom we saw in it are men of huge measure.'”
It has taken me over twenty-one years before I was finally allowed inside my father’s brownstone in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and now only because I’m here to sit shiva for him in the days after his death.
”Now Korah… together with two hundred and fifty Israelites… combined against Moses and Aaron and said to them, “You have gone too far! For all the community are holy, all of them, and Adonai is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourselves above Adonai’s congregation?””
“I sold this company for a billion. After what those idiots have done to it, I wouldn’t buy it back for a nickel on the dollar!”
”God said: “You and your brother Aaron take the rod and assemble the community, and before their very eyes order the rock to yield its water. “
Raymond Katz slammed the door behind him as he entered his home, burdened with four shopping bags.
