In a personal game of divination, I opened the book to a random page and read:

"Allgemeiner Niedergang. Seitdem das Synedrium aufgehört hat zu existieren, hat auch der Gesang in den Hochzeitshäusern aufgehört, wie es heißt: Nicht mehr trinkt man Wein mit Gesang."

When the Sanhedron ceased to be, so too did song cease in the places of celebration [Hochzeit: 'wedding' in modern German; A. Cohen, translating from the Hebrew, has 'feasting'], as it is said: No longer shall wine be drunk with song.

I dwell on the words: "Niedergang" --"Gesang" -- "Hochzeit" -- "Wein" -- "Gesang" again. They held me -- standing there at the 1€-book stack -- like the impressionistic words of poets and prophets. (Do the passersby see that there's a change in me?) I thought of Baudelaire, whose poems I finally bought yesterday. Un soir, l'âme du vin chantait dans les bouteilles: ... And I had just been having lunch with my choir director and his wife, enjoying the wine and speaking about the decline of -- well, it doesn't matter -- before he had to go play the organ at a wedding.

Our concert is tomorrow. We will be singing synagogue music, so little of which has survived.

These words are found in the Mishnah: of course the word itself -- משנה -- means "repetition".  It's from the Mishnah Sotah IX, on adultery. I'm planning to attend a play this week -- Schnitzler's Anatol -- wherein the question of fidelity is posed. Hofmannsthal wrote the foreword. Last week I bought two books by Hofmannsthal from this very box of books where today the Babylonian Talmud stood out to me.