other's labor. It will indeed be a life of idleness that existence in heaven where there are no poor and charity need not be dispensed; nor are there six days of labor when one may toil cheerfully to prepare for the Sabbath, the Seventh Day. For in heaven there is continuous Sabbath, and all differences between week days and Sabbath days and festivals disappear. Neither toil nor care will weary the flesh, but peace will hover over all, and wisdom, like a perpetual light, will illumine every nook and cranny of the vast celestial empire. The words of God will flow ceaselessly from the lips of the children of men and every word uttered will turn into a gleaming pearl, to stud the crowns of the righteous, and a rain of rubies will pave the highways where the hosts of angels tread.
Such are the day dreams which the woman of the Ghetto delights to indulge in, dreams of future joys which are foreign to the harsh present—dreams from which she is often awakened by the rude grip of reality.
Does the burden of her thoughts always gravitate towards heaven—are the women of the Ghetto always solemn, never frivolous? Do they hunger never for a taste of the world—are not their hearts captivated by the glamour and gorge- ousness of the worldly pleasures? If their eyes are ever enticed to look beyond this sphere, and their hearts led astray by the allurements of gayety and careless living, they inflict punishment upon themselves and seek to expiate their errors by multiplying their deeds of charity. They pity those whose thoughts are bent only on self indulgence. The good women of the Ghetto know full well that they who snatch the cream of life on earth will have to subsist on its scum when they reach heaven. They who are masters here shall be slaves in the other
life, and they who on this planet sit in the high places, will have to content themselves with obscurity in the upper regions. A story is told of a certain Talmud Cochom whose little son rushed in excitedly to tell his father of a beautiful princess whom he had seen, and who was wondrously attired in robes of state adorned with precious stones. "Shatch!" said the father to his admiring son, "in the world to come this princess' will be a servant of thy mother's who is now working in the kitchen." It never occurs to the men or women of the Ghetto that their lot is not an enviable one. Instead of deeming themselves objects of pity, they rather think themselves able to bestow it upon others whose position in the world to is not as assured as theirs.
This view of life and death is the direct result of their training, especially that of the woman's. She is the creature of heredity and environment; rarely does she attempt to act or think independently of their line of demarkation. It is not on record that women of the Ghetto should betray the teachings of their mothers, whose successors they become. The mantle of the mother descends upon the shoulders of the daughter who carries it with a natural grace, as if it had been cut out for her. Everything in her environment contributes to the strengthening of the tie which binds her to her modus vivendi. I have yet to discover that she departs from the manner to which she is born. Taken as a whole, what sort of a being is she, this not yet emancipated daughter of the Ghetto? Her psychology is not very involved, it presents no subtle problem. Analyze her and you find that her inner and outer life harmonize. She is not beset by any soul struggles. Her spirit is safely anchored on the shores of peace. Her emotions and passions —we will assume that she pos—