The Masnavi

Six books, twenty-five thousand couplets, dictated over a dozen years and left unfinished mid-story — called in the tradition "the Quran in Persian." It opens with the reed: Listen to this reed, how it complains — it is telling the tale of separations. Ever since I was cut from the reed-bed, men and women have wept at my sound. Everything after is commentary: the soul remembers its source, and the remembering hurts, and the hurt is the way home. The Zohar's Sabbath hymns and the Shekhinah's exile-songs are the same music in Aramaic and Hebrew.