ded his bow
to his violin. And he who makes us feel all this has that indefinable,
magic, glorious thing known as Genius.

When it was over, there swept through the room that sigh following
tension relieved. Rabbi Thalmann passed a hand over his tired eyes, like
one returning from a far mental journey; then rose, and came forward
to the pulpit. He began, in Hebrew, the opening words of the memorial
service, and so on to the prayers in English, with their words of
infinite humility and wisdom.

"Thou hast implanted in us the capacity for sin, but not sin itself!"

Fanny stirred. She had learned that a brief half hour ago. The service
marched on, a moving and harrowing thing. The amens rolled out with a
new fervor from the listeners. There seemed nothing comic now in the way
old Ben Reitman, with his slower eyes, always came out five words behind
the rest who tumbled upon the responses and scurried briskly through
them, so that his fine old voice, somewhat hoarse and quavering now,
rolled out its "Amen!" in solitary majesty. They came to that gem of
humility, the mourners' prayer; the ancient and ever-solemn Kaddish
prayer. There is nothing in the written language that, for sheer drama
and magnificence, can equal it as it is chanted in the Hebrew.

As Rabbi Thalmann began to intone it in its monotonous repetition of
praise, there arose certain black-robed figures from their places and
stood with heads bowed over their prayer books. These were members of
the congregation from whom death had taken a toll during the past year.
Fanny rose with her mother and Theodore, who had left the choir loft to
join them. The little wheezy organ played very softly. The black-robed
figures swayed. Here and there a half-stifled sob rose, and was crushed.
Fanny felt a hot haze that blurred her vision. She winked it away, and
another burned in its place. Her shoulders shook with a sob. She felt
her mother's hand close over her own that held one side of the book.
The prayer, that was not of mourning but of praise, ended with a final
crescendo from the organ, The silent black-robed figures were seated.

Over the little, spent congregation hung a glorious atmosphere of
detachment. These Jews, listening to the words that had come from the
lips of the prophets in Israel, had been, on this day, thrown back
thousands of years, to the time when the destruction of the temple was
as real as the shattered spires and dome of the cathedral at Rheims.