Trans­la­tor’s note: On Octo­ber 7, as the scope of the heinous ter­ror­ist attack in Israel was becom­ing appar­ent, we — like so many oth­ers — found our­selves doom­scrolling, search­ing for news, for com­mu­ni­ty with whom to share our hor­ror, anger, and fear, and ulti­mate­ly for hope. As edi­tors of this jour­nal, on the top of our minds was also the ques­tion of what we could bring to our read­ers that might be help­ful and rel­e­vant and speak to the con­cerns that are sure­ly on the fore­front of their minds in these dark days. It was a tall order to ask of our social media feeds.

We found some­thing that spoke to our needs in Ber Kotler­man’s poem. The grand vision of hope in this poem cap­tures the themes of Sim­chat Torah, when the Torah read­ing cal­en­dar has us begin­ning anew at Breyshis, and uses them to com­fort and embold­en us to believe that it is pos­si­ble to move toward a future of peace, even in a time of war. I trans­lat­ed the poem — and we pushed it quick­ly through our edi­to­r­i­al process — so our read­ers could share in this hope at a time when it is essential.

Ber Kotler­man is a Yid­dish author and Pro­fes­sor of Yid­dish stud­ies at Bar Ilan Uni­ver­si­ty, Israel. This poem was his first reac­tion to reports of vic­tims of Hamas crimes in south­ern Israel. He recit­ed it for the first time at a work­shop on con­tem­po­rary Yid­dish poet­ry orga­nized in Vien­na joint­ly by the Bar-Ilan Cen­ter for Yid­dish Stud­ies, the Oxford School of Rare Jew­ish Lan­guages and the Insti­tute of Jew­ish Stud­ies at the Jagiel­lon­ian Uni­ver­si­ty in Krakow, on Octo­ber 9. The title of the poem in the orig­i­nal is a quote from the Shachar­it morn­ing prayer: [The Blessed One, who spoke] and the world came into being.