"No indeed," said the Prophet. He gazed across the dunes, across the empty, windless desert, across the far mountains, across to the first wisps of fog that were rising from the far distant blue and lapping waves. "Just as that," he began, "blue conjoins with darkness. Just as that, light sinks into immensity. Just as that, emptiness and light cascade, flicker, play upon the shadows of our passage."

With a rueful laugh, "I am no stranger to your ways. I have dwelled in your tents. I have seen the glistening white of them during the tranquility of dawn. O happy hour; O benificent being that grants us on this hour through the day the plentitude of rising, but the barreness of fall..."

"I have known the darkness, I have seen the void, cette certaine malade inconnue; and a candle is every flicker of light like the jewel of her forehead, and flickering flames adorn her ears. O Israel, Israel, what are your laws? O wherefore your tabernacles, Israel? My Israel was the daughter flowing into dust; my Israel forsakened and abandoned."

"And when the Shekinah fled into exile, the people followed her: O Israel, my Israel, you are flown upon the dust, like the last trickling rays of the setting sun: for when the Lord sacrificed his son in spirit, so he forsook his daughter in her body. O uhappiness, O Ruin, thou doest dwell in Zion. Count the days, for as the rising and the setting of the earth; as the breaking and the shaking off of leaves; as the snows, the winters, lives' calumnies, autumns' harvests, winters' joys -- so shall be your eyes and lips and hands. You are destined all to fall,"

The prophet paused, turned to the people, gave a long look to their spellbound faces like a child's wail, spoke heavily,

"There is no saviour. No, for there can be none. No, for God has abandoned the Klal Yishrael."