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A listener sitting through the whole of the “Ring” — Wagner’s four-opera epos about the birth and destruction of a civilization — has to wait two and a half hours for the first relatable human interaction.

What came across in the documentary as an uncomfortable mix produces a satisfying combination in an outsized epos like this one, the two impulses tempering and complementing each other.

Retailing for £1,000, sales soon boomed, with the company advertising on Google, paying "5p a click" whenever someone in the UK typed in the word "epos".

Perhaps for the first time in Jewish history, our epos was not only about surviving annihilation, but also about human bonding across a national and religious chasm: the coming together of the different.

There lay the greatness of the heroic epos for readers of old,—the sense of human littleness, the melancholy of broken aspirations, swallowed up in the transcending sublimity of man's endurance and daring.