CYNTH1A OZICK
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knows that God is a hidden God, his effort to interpret it constantly
finds something new to feed on." How many principles of human con–
duct have grown up upon the horns of that ram in the thicket!
Here, it goes without saying, is the quintessence of the Jewish her–
itage-and habit-of interpretation. The ram is certainly a ram, but it is
also an enduring idea, an idea that must be reiterated generation after
generation: that the sacrifice of children is proscribed, that there can be
no precept that will permit the sacral reverence of death, that the order
of the universe asks us to choose life. To read the story without inter–
preting the ram is to fall out of civilization. The poet may sing of look–
ing "on Beauty bare"-there is such a poet-but to look on anything
bare is truly to look upon a skull. And to look on Jerusalem bare of
interpretation is to prefer a dry wadi to a flowing spring. Jerusalem is
above all an
interpreted
city, and therein lies its holiness. The nature of
this holiness-its link with reality, if reality is understood as deep com–
prehension-inheres in remembering, in not forgetting. But what are we
to remember? What is it we are not to forget?
Jerusalem became the Jerusalem we know only when it became
endowed with meaning, only when a particular interpretation was over–
laid upon it. That interpretation, that meaning, was the obligation to
form a civilization of obligation. We may call it the interweaving of con–
science and conduct, we may call it Covenant, we may call it Torah;
whatever we name it, it is a set of ideas that are the inescapable conse–
quence of Jewish monotheism.
That
is Jerusalem'S meaning: Jerusalem
in its founding was intended to put into the world the understanding
that there are numbers and numbers of concepts and things and beings
that are not worthy of human veneration, that our task is to sort out, to
discriminate through intellect and discernment. There are other
monotheisms, of course; but Jewish monotheism, represented by
Jerusalem, turns away from notions of incarnation or fatalism-turns
away surely, but without the fanaticism of hatred. Among the most stir–
ring principles of Jewish monotheism are the Noahide Laws, a guide for
societies to live side by side in tranquility, through a few essential
pledges held in common. Some are self-evident-such as not seeking to
shed blood-but one is especially noteworthy: the establishment of
courts of justice.
This gives a hint, I believe, as to why contemporary historians are
wholly mistaken in the way they describe Jewish nationalism. Jewish
nationalism-Zionism-is the product, they claim, of nineteenth-cen–
tury European nationalism; it is merely another version of that same
sweeping movement. But this is a shallow analysis-or, rather, it is a
