Love Quote by Shmuel Y. Agnon

Agnon slips a whole theory of belonging into the modest language of “privilege.” The sentence starts with bureaucracy - “these offices” - and ends in something warmer and more dangerous: love. That pivot matters. He’s describing a life in which Jewish community is not an abstraction or a slogan but an archive you build through institutions and through yearning, paperwork and intimacy. The line quietly insists that modern Jewish identity is forged in both places: the public machinery of communal life and the private hunger to recognize yourself in others.

The subtext is a negotiation with modernity. “Almost every Jewish person” is obviously impossible on its face, but that exaggeration signals a different truth: in a dispersed people, proximity has to be manufactured. Offices stand in for the modern infrastructures of survival - committees, aid networks, publishing circles, communal leadership - the kinds of structures that become necessary when a population is scattered, vulnerable, and relentlessly categorized by states. Agnon, writing in a century of migration, pogroms, and the catastrophe that would culminate in the Holocaust, frames contact itself as a moral achievement.

Then comes “brethren,” a word that can sound quaint until you hear its edge: it’s a claim of obligation. He’s not collecting acquaintances; he’s refusing anonymity. “Members of my people” reads like a simple identifier, but it’s also a vow to treat strangers as kin - a radical posture in an era that trained everyone, Jew and non-Jew alike, to sort people into types. Agnon’s intent isn’t sentimental unity; it’s a hard-earned insistence that a people remains a people only by continually choosing one another.