A son who will never be older than his motherland - neither older nor younger. There shall be two heads – but you will only see one – there will be knees and a nose, a nose and knees. Newspaper praises him, two mothers raise him! Bicycles love him – but crowds will shove him! Sisters will weep, cobras will creep… Washing will hide him – voices will guide him! Friends will mutilate him – blood will betray him! Spittoons will brain him – doctors will drain him – jungle will claim him – wizards reclaim him! Soldiers will try him – tyrants will fry him… He will have sons without having sons! He will be old before he is old! And he will die before he is dead!

The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don't know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress.

When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.

Yiddish became the Jews’ tongue via the Jewish mother, who, not being male, was denied a Hebrew education.

By the time a man realises that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he is wrong.

"In college, I had a course in Latin, and one day the word "divorce" came up. I always figured it came from some root that meant "divide." In truth, it comes from "divertere," which means "to divert."

I believe that. All divorce does is divert you, taking you away from everything you thought you knew and everything you thought you wanted and steering you into all kinds of other stuff, like discussions about your mother's girdle and whether she should marry someone else."

And so, by the arts of Ulysses, [5] they drew me from my mother under pretense of being wedded to Achilles.

"The sons of single mothers inevitably encounter well-meaning family members who like to remind us of our role as "the man of the house." The statement usually made me wince, the way it implicitly merged the roles of son, father, and husband; the way it erased the grown woman to whom the house actually belonged."

Long, long ago; her thought was of that child
By him begot, the son by whom the sire
Was murdered and the mother left to breed
With her own seed, a monstrous progeny.
Then she bewailed the marriage bed whereon
Poor wretch, she had conceived a double brood,
Husband by husband, children by her child.

It has been said that the basic principle of Jewish ethics lies in the idea of mandatory mitzvas. Said Eleazar ben Simeon: “The world is judged by the majority of its people [and] an individual by the majority of his deeds. Happy is he who performs a good deed: that may tip the scale for him and the world [italics mine].” Israel Zangwill called the mitzvas the Jews’ “sacred sociology.

The notion of ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ was one the Jews adopted before the birth of Christ and always practised even when the community as a whole was distressed.

"One would think that potential motherhood should make women as a class as sacred as the priesthood. In common parlance we have much fine-spun theorizing on the exalted office of the mother, her immense influence in moulding the character of her sons; "the hand that rocks the cradle moves the world," etc., but in creeds and codes, in constitutions and Scriptures, in prose and verse, we do not see these lofty paeans recorded or verified in living facts. As a class, women were treated among the Jews as an inferior order of beings, just as they are to-day in all civilized nations. And now, as then, men claim to be guided by the will of God."

When death takes your mother, it steals that word forever.

"They say that men should look at the mother of the girl they intend to marry," Yvette said. "Girls who did what I did should consider the wife a man has discarded or worn out, and know thye are not going to do much better."