"How good it is when brothers sit down together . . ."

By an incredible synchronicity of events, I am reading the Yom Kippur section of The Invisible Bridge on the day of.

From The Invisible Bridge
Julie Orringer

Together they said the prayer for donning the prayer shawl; together they draped the shawls over their shoulders. The cantor sang in Hebrew, How good and sweet it is when brothers sit down together. Again and again the familiar melody. One line low and somber like a work chant, the next climbing up into the arch of the ceiling like a question: Isn't it good for brothers to sit down together? Polaner had learned the melody in Kraków. Andras had learned it in Konyár. The cantor had learned it from his grandfather in Minsk. The three old men standing beside Polaner had learned it in Gdynia and Amsterdam and Prague. It had come from somewhere. It had escaped pogroms in Odessa and Oradea, had found itscway to this synagogue, would find its way to others that had not yet been built.

How beautiful, the persistence of faith, it's universality, and its power to transcend nationality and unite a people

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