4 Quotes by Daniel Torday

We might be able to see God's body in the Kabbalah's ten Sefirot, but it was 1986, barely forty years since our grandparents' generation sat desperate and fated in their East European neighborhoods. Never again, our teachers incanted to us Monday after Monday, Wednesday after Wednesday. But when I picture myself in those rooms in the basement of our shul, even now I can only hear the incantation's reciprocal: It will happen again. Beware. Be always aware.

At times, always unexpected, the flames of the past will come and burn a hole in my day.

We might be able to see God’s body in the Kabbalah’s ten Sefirot, but it was 1986, barely forty years since our grandparents’ generation sat desperate and fated in their East European neighborhoods. Never again, our teachers incanted to us Monday after Monday, Wednesday after Wednesday. But when I picture myself in those rooms in the basement of our shul, even now I can only hear the incantation’s reciprocal: It will happen again. Beware. Be always aware.

I had only acted and acted and acted and acted, some delusional anti-Hamlet acting instead of thinking. And now every one of my thoughts was retrospective, as if I’d set out on a new life with my gaze cast ever backward.