O Jerusalem

God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son!”

Abe said, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on!”

God said, “No.”

Abe said, “What?”

God said, “You can do what you want, Abe, but

The next time you see me comin’, you

better run!”

Abe said, “Where you want all this killin’ done?”

God said, “Out on Highway 61.”

--BOB DYLAN

****

The poor Jews. With or without harmonica accompaniment, they have been wandering down one highway or another for a long, long time, lacking not only a travel agent but also, pace Bob Dylan, a decent bard. The Tanakh (to use the inoffensive name for the Hebrew Bible known otherwise as the Old Testament) contains more greatest hits than a week of “American Bandstands.” But the meistersinger has yet to come along who can condense and inspire and do for the Israelites what Shakespeare does for Elizabethans or what Homer does for Ancient Greece.

The reason is relatively simple. As much as the 12 million Jews in the world today can congregate under the big tent of the Chosen People (whatever that may mean), there are more types of Jews, more categories of Jewishness, than there are versions of “Rainy Day Woman.” The reasons for these divergences are more complex--as complex, say, as the reasons for Napoleon’s Russian defeat. “Mom is simple,” Vladimir Nabokov wrote in a lecture on “The Death of Ivan Ilych.” “The Saturday Evening Post is simple . . . damnation is simple. But Tolstoys and Melvilles are not simple.” Nor are the Jews.

That hasn’t prevented some very worthy people from attempting to simplify. Arthur Hertzberg and Aron Hirt-Manheimer call their book, “Jews: The Essence and Character of a People,” a “scandalous book.” They claim that several publishers in the United States and Europe refused to publish it, “fearing that it would bring the wrath of the Jewish establishment upon them.” Methinks the rabbi doth protest too much. The claim smacks of trying to make a silk press release from a sour rejection letter. The fault lies not in themselves but in their publicists, who have blurbed them into banality.

Which is unfair to the book. Hertzberg, a professor and rabbi with pulpits in the suburbs of New Jersey and the pages of the New York Review of Books, is a well-meaning man, able to jump from narrative to Midrash in a single comma. He and his coauthor, the editor of Reform Judaism magazine, have chosen to write their book in the first person. The royal “I” infuses the whole with the scent of sermon, following the Jewish character from its singular source in the Hebrew Bible and536870913the Talmud down through history “into a delta--the delta being the modern age--in which it diverges into numerous streams.”

The delta of a river with its source high up in, say, a mountain named Sinai, is a wonderful, simple image. It assumes, of course, a sense of continuity among the Jewish people--itself a source of much argument. Better, it sets up two of the issues that divide contemporary Jews. The first is the question of how many rivulets at the delta are truly Jewish. There are many Jews in Israel and elsewhere who are keen to deny legitimacy to Jews who do not follow their particular brand of orthodoxy. The second is the question of source. There are Jews, perhaps the majority in the world today, who see their descent from the Bible in only a limited, nontheological way. It is, in fact, the inability of Jews to recognize themselves that calls the authors to examine the essence of the Jewish character.

In the end, however, the authors fail to find some kind of Unified Field Theory that will explain, much less unite, all the rivulets of the delta. What they succeed at doing, and gloriously so, is to express a liberal and liberating manifesto that is too little trumpeted. It is a manifesto that calls for common sense and humanism to lead Jews into the new millennium, that calls for reinterpretations of Jewish law to acknowledge the equality of women and reinterpretations of Zionist law to acknowledge the equality of the 700,000 non-Jewish citizens of Israel.

The famous historian of the kabbala, and of Jewish messianism, Gershom Scholem, warned many times against calling the state of Israel the “first root of our redemption.” “The Jewish nation,” he insisted, “is a human solution to contemporary political problems. To make of it an instrument of the messianic drama is the greatest of heresies. The Jews must create a just and decent society for all of its inhabitants; only then will it be a reflection of the Jewish spirit.” Scholem, Hertzberg and Hirt-Manheimer are right, of course, only up to a point. If they had called for a rescinding of the Law of Return--ah, then we would see some spirit and some sparks.

Thomas Cahill is neither a rabbi nor a Jew. Former director of religious publishing at Doubleday, he is the author of “The Gifts of the Jews,” the second volume in a series called “The Hinges of History” that began with “How The Irish Saved Civilization.”

“We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another,” Cahill writes in his preface, “war followed by war, outrage by outrage. . . . In this series, ‘The Hinges of History,’ I mean to retell the story of the Western world as the story of the great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West.” The Jews, or more accurately, the early biblical Jews, are presumably one of the hinges that opened a door toward a view of the individual; history as a linear sequence.

While admiring Cahill’s motives and application to his subject (he spent several years among Jewish scholars at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City and elsewhere, synthesizing roomfuls of material in several languages), I couldn’t help feeling vaguely uncomfortable about the whole notion of gifts and gift-givers. They (the Jews) gave gifts to us. But who are “us”? Perhaps it’s ritual paranoia that flashes an image of gift-bearing Magi. But the majority of the Western world does believe, after all, that this particular hinge rusted long ago and needs only the baptism of Three-in-One oil to cure the squeak.

The gifts are as simple as frankincense and myrrh: They are history and individuality. According to Cahill, the Greeks and other Middle Eastern polytheists who preceded the Jews were circular thinkers. They saw life as a cycle, as regular as the phases of the moon or the seasons. If there was a goal in life, it was to avoid motion and thus break out of the circularity of time.

The Jews on the other hand were not just patriarchs in motion but people with a mission. “Without the individual,” Cahill says provocatively, “neither time nor history is possible.” And according to Cahill, the first individual, the first man to break out of the cycle of idols and moon worship, was Abraham, or Avram, as the Tanakh calls him in the days when he still had his foreskin, prior to his covenant with God.

“Seeing the god in all his splendor and being invited to such intimacy causes Avram to fall ‘upon his face.’ The relationship is becoming more intense; and as we witness its development, we must acknowledge something just below the surface of events: without Avram’s highly colored sense of himself--of his own individuality--there could hardly be any relationship, yet the relationship is also made possible by the exclusive intensity that this incipient monotheism requires, so much so that we may almost say that individuality (with its consequent possibility of an interpersonal relationship) is the flip side of monotheism.”

Individuality as the flip side of monotheism, man in God’s image--these are compelling concepts. And yet, one wishes that Cahill had avoided listing them among the gifts that this “rag-tag army of visionary nomads” had schlepped on the backs of their camels to the grateful goyim. Perhaps my own highly-colored sense of myself as a Jew is responsible for my discomfort. As squeamish as I am to hear the Jewish people praised by Arthur Hertzberg and a long line of tribal boosters, I am even more loath to hear a non-Jew honor a club to which I belong willy-nilly.

I am most loath to watch a Jewish author club history. Cartoonist Stan Mack’s “The Story of the Jews” uses the same technique that followers of his “Real-Life Funnies” in the Village Voice have come to admire: real-life dialogue. Unfortunately, his take on the Jews is neither simple nor complex nor real. It merely breaks the First Commandment of humorists--thou shalt not bore. He writes with the same wide-eyed sense of discovery that made Norman Mailer’s “The Gospel According to the Son” such a dull book. Ya know, each of them seem to be saying, there’s a real story here. Lemme tell ya. There was this guy named Moses. . . .

I am far more comfortable with the more complex and historical analyses of a pair of Jewish non-Americans.

Frederic Raphael is best known in America as the author of “The Glittering Prizes,” the story of a young Jewish student at Cambridge University in the 1950s, which was turned into an excellent British television series of the same name in 1978 starring Tom Conti, and as the screenwriter of “Darling” and “Far From the Madding Crowd.” He is also a widely respected and highly feared columnist for a number of British publications, including the Times Literary Supplement and the Jewish Quarterly.

“The Necessity of Anti-Semitism,” a collection of these columns, echoes the title of a “notorious pamphlet” by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Necessity of Atheism.” Necessity, in Raphael’s case, is not prescriptive, but rather a word to describe the role that Judophobia plays in “the great fiction which used to be called Christendom and is now ‘Europe.’ ” Raphael, an Anglo American, born in 1931, “like Churchill in one petty respect . . . British father, American mother,” confesses that he has led a relatively privileged existence, untouched by the harsher forms of anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, he has found himself, over the years, drawn and redrawn to the subject, like a moth to a Shabbos candle.

Raphael writes about a number of non-Jewish subjects as well as “Jewish Self-Hatred,” “The Politics of Martin Heidegger” and the great keeper of timetables and details, Raul Hilberg. He wisely resists the temptations of examining the Great Theme of 20th Century Anti-Semitism: “[n]othing has contributed more to the mystification of the Holocaust,” he writes, “than the search for some great, overriding ‘reason’ for it.” But he is most fascinating when he takes on one of the great poets of the century, a man who in many respects is Raphael’s doppelganger. T.S. Eliot came to England from St. Louis by way of Boston; Raphael from Chicago by way of New York. “Like Eliot,” he states, “I had returned to where I had never been and did my best to seem a native.” Although Raphael admits that when it comes to attacking Eliot’s anti-Semitism, he has, “in truth, arrived rather late at the pillory where his image has long been a venerable target for literary brickbats,” he still has a go, calling Eliot “the Albert Speer of Parnassus, too fastidious to have an accurate conscience.”

Nevertheless, Raphael confesses, with the sympathies of all of us who have wept with Isolde, that “[t]here is something both charming and disconcerting in the discovery that so strange a God had more of a sense of humour than adolescent piety ever cared to notice.” One comes away from Raphael’s grapplings not so much with the memory of who won or lost as with the image of the grappler, the reluctant Englishman fighting, as in all the best matches, with himself.

Ironically, or perhaps not, it is a Frenchman and a classics scholar who presents the most coherent and the most complex demonstration of the Jew in history. Pierre Vidal-Naquet hails from the land of the Dreyfus Affair and the Algerian War. And it is precisely this non-American perspective that gives his book of essays, “The Jews,” such a powerful ability to surprise and inform.

Alfred Dreyfus, as you may recall, may have been the unwitting father of modern Zionism. And yet Vidal-Naquet’s revisit paints a portrait of a reluctant Jew, whose denial of the emotional horrors of his captivity are almost pathological. The Algerian War of 1952 gives Vidal-Naquet a control against which to test his own reaction to Israel’s mistreatment of its Arab citizenry.

But it is Vidal-Naquet the classicist who brings weight to his attacks on some of the most formidable of Jewish myths. In several essays on the writings of the 1st century historian Flavius Josephus, who traded in his Judaism for a Roman tunic, Vidal-Naquet scrapes away layers of myth from the foundations of two of the greatest monuments to Jewish heroism: the Maccabees and Masada. Masada, that 1st century Dead Sea fortress celebrated by recent generations of Jews, where Josephus writes that 960 besieged Jews committed suicide rather than surrender to the Romans, becomes an empty Zionist symbol under the scalpel of Vidal-Naquet.

“Naturally,” Vidal-Naquet says, “tragedies of the Hitlerian era have contributed to this resurrection of the name Masada. But ironically, the man through whom we know all that could be known of this history before [the archeologist Yigael] Yadin’s excavations was frankly considered a traitor. Josephus was once judged and convicted of high treason in southwestern France, and his ‘trial,’ conducted under the terrible circumstances of the Vilna ghetto in Poland, was mounted on stage as a play.” And unfortunately, neither the textual evidence of Josephus’ memorialization of the mass suicide on the rock above the Dead Sea nor the selective evidence of Yadin bear up under scrutiny no matter what contemporary needs are served by the myth.

Nor does the supposed unity of the Jews behind the zealotry of the Maccabees, that “maquis of pure men who were purifiers,” as translator David Ames Curtis leaves them in Vidal-Naquet’s Resistance-era French, bear up. Legend has it that the Hebrews united behind the Maccabees in a famous insurrection against the Hellenic government of Antiochus III and returned the temple into Jewish hands. Vidal-Naquet wonders at this unity.

“What takes place in the case of an insurrection? Far from disappearing, differences deepen. . . . The supreme characteristic of these insurrections is that, not only did they concern and could they concern Jews and Jews alone, but in the long run each group had its interpretation of what it meant to be Jewish and tended to stick with it. The true Israel is what each group thinks itself to be.”

“We know what followed,” Vidal-Naquet continues, “the mutation proceeded in two opposite directions. One side cast off the moorings that had tied the universal God to a singular ethnic group: this is Saint Paul’s road to Damascus, then to Rome. The other took over the conflict of interpretations and even gave to this conflict itself, in the Mishnah and then the Talmud, institutional value. . . . In order for Judaism to triumph under its Christian form, the Kingdom had to become the Roman Empire. In the long run, it had to pass from the category of the Good to the category of Evil incarnate, from hope embodied in the son of David to the Beast of Revelations, only to return, with Constantine, to the category of the Good.”

This is heady stuff to ponder while, say, lighting eight candles on the last night of Hanukkah, the festival designed to celebrate the victory of the Maccabees. It is a difficult and complex and therefore compelling scenario for the survival of Judaism. In essay after essay, on the emancipation of the Jews, on heroes and villains, memory and history, Claude Lanzmann versus Marcel Ophuls, Sabra and Shatila, Vidal-Naquet convinces with his own skepticism. He lays his scholarship before you.

There is not a single Jewish thread here but many. And there is something enchanting in the multiplicity of the sources themselves. No single Hertzbergian source here. It’s deltas all the way. So come on up and pick a bard, any bard.