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"Jerusalem: The Scandal of Particularity"
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At a ceremony in Jerusalem on May 24, Norman Podhoretz received the Guardian of Zion Award from the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University. Following is the text of his lecture:
Being here on the 40th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem reminds me that I was also here in 1995 for the 3,000th anniversary of this city as the capital of King David’s unified Kingdom of Israel. During the opening ceremonies, which I attended with my Israeli daughter Ruthie Blum, one speaker after another arose to proclaim that Jerusalem would never again be divided, and that it would forever remain the capital of Israel. But instead of being reassured, I found myself growing more and more uneasy. After hearing the third or fourth such confident proclamation, I turned to Ruthie and muttered, “Uh-oh, there goes Jerusalem.”
My remark may have been flip, but—even apart from the cynicism that the vows of politicians so often and so rightly inspire—behind it there were serious grounds for being apprehensive. For even while the then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was declaring that “There is no state of Israel without Jerusalem and no peace without Jerusalem undivided,” his government was quietly tolerating Palestinian political activity in East Jerusalem. Furthermore, much of the world was already treating the PLO’s offices in Orient House, in which this activity was taking place, as ministries of the future Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Then there was Bill Clinton, the then President of the United States. Clinton might be happy to state unequivocally that “I recognize Jerusalem as an undivided city and the eternal capital of Israel.” Nevertheless, his ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, had just joined with all the European ambassadors in refusing to attend the opening ceremonies of Jerusalem 3000. This was the same Martin Indyk who, as the head of a think tank in Washington, had written a paper advocating that the American embassy be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Now, however, Indyk was lobbying against precisely this same move. Thanks to the perversities engendered by the Oslo peace process, he even enjoyed the tacit approval of the Israeli government in doing so.
So far, blessedly, my apprehensions of 1995 over the future status of Jerusalem have not been realized. In one respect, nothing at all has changed since then: as with the celebrations of 1995, neither the American ambassador nor the representatives of the European Union attended the opening ceremony for the 40th anniversary of the city’s reunification. In another respect, there has even been an improvement: Orient House has been shut down, and the Palestinian Authority has in the past few years been prevented by various means from conducting organized political business within East Jerusalem.
Nevertheless, the stark and simple truth is that today there is more reason, much more reason, to worry about Jerusalem than there was in 1995. In 1995, in spite of the ominous signs of trouble ahead that seemed all too obvious to some of us, very few Israelis outside the fringes of the far Left were willing to contemplate a redivision of Jerusalem. In those days, this was still the reddest of red lines, and not even the promise of a peace treaty could induce the vast majority of Israelis to cross it. Not so today. In fact, according to a recent poll, 57 percent of Jewish Israelis “are willing to make some concession in the city as part of a peace deal with the Palestinians.”
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One rationale for this willingness has been supplied by my old friend, the historian Walter Laqueur. In a recent book entitled Dying for Jerusalem, Laqueur informs us that “the city is already divided,” and he goes on to invoke the authority of the prophet Isaiah to justify taking a relaxed attitude toward this situation: Isaiah, he writes,
said many wonderful things about Jerusalem—that for Zion’s sake he will not keep silent, and that out of Zion will go forth the law. But he did not say that his right hand will forget her cunning unless the Ministry of Tourism and the Ministry of Health are located in this city.
And Laqueur adds that nowhere in the Hebrew Bible is it laid down that “sovereignty on part of the city cannot be shared with others.”
Hillel Halkin, a prominent Israeli intellectual and another old friend, agrees. He points out that the great majority of Jerusalem’s Arab inhabitants live in areas of the city that were
never traditionally thought to be part of Jerusalem at all. When one speaks, therefore, of “repartitioning” Jerusalem, this is not quite the frightful specter that it might appear at first glance.
There is also a variant of this rationale that was given to me privately by another prominent intellectual who once occupied a high position in the Israeli government. Since, he said, the city was already de facto divided to the point where neither he nor anyone he knew ever dared to venture into its eastern part after dark, why continue resisting a de jure acknowledgment of that reality? (To this I replied that there were neighborhoods in New York and other American cities of which the same thing could be said, but that did not mean that they should not remain parts of the United States.)
A third, and perhaps the most telling rationale of all, is demographic. Because the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem have a much higher birthrate than the Jews living here, and because so many Jews have been leaving the city, the Jewish majority has steadily dwindled. Furthermore, according to another poll, no fewer than 78 percent of Jewish Israelis do not wish to live in Jerusalem. In addition to being put off by the scarcity of jobs, some feel that there are already too many Palestinians here, and some, if truth be told, feel that there are too many Jews—haredi Jews, that is. There is thus a distinct possibility that Jews will in any case wind up as a minority within their own capital city.
Which is why a hawk like Professor Dan Schueftan of Haifa University can join with a Peace Now activist like the novelist Amos Oz in advocating a redivision of the city. Yet Schueftan—who calls Israel “the eighth wonder of the world”—believes in achieving as much separation as possible between Jews and Arabs, while Oz—who dwells obsessively on Israel’s putative sins against the Palestinians—dreams of an Israeli ambassador to Palestine and a Palestinian ambassador to Israel strolling frequently to each other’s offices in the two parts of Jerusalem for coffee and a friendly chat. Needless to say, no such vision of the lion lying down with the lamb presents itself to Schueftan’s eyes. He favors a re-division only because, as he put it not long ago, “Israel without the parts of East Jerusalem heavily populated by Arabs . . . is stronger than Israel that includes 300,000 [more] Arabs.”
Now, even though I know that demographic projections often turn out to be wrong, and even though I believe that strength cannot be measured by demography alone, I certainly do not deny that the numbers give serious cause for concern. I also freely admit that no comparison can be drawn between Jerusalem and New York, or indeed between Jerusalem and any other city on the face of the earth. In fact, I think that Mayor Uri Lupolianski is exactly right when he declares that “Jerusalem is not only an inseparable part of the Jewish nation, it is the basis of the existence of the Jewish nation.” Conversely, Walter Laqueur is in my judgment exactly wrong when he cites Isaiah, of all prophets, in making his case for a certain nonchalance toward the possibility that Jerusalem might be redivided in some future negotiation.
To understand how egregiously off the mark Laqueur is, we need to recall a little history.
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After the death of David’s son Solomon, the united kingdom forged by David was broken apart into two separate kingdoms—Israel in the north with its eventual capital in Samaria, and Judah in the south with its capital in Jerusalem. But in 722 B.C.E., after some two centuries of stormy existence, the northern kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Assyrians and its people were scattered to the winds to become the Ten Lost Tribes. About twenty years later, in 701 B.C.E., Assyria, now ruled by Sennacherib, was on the point of meting out the same fate to Judah, of which Hezekiah was now the king.
Having already overrun much of Judah, Sennacherib was laying siege to Jerusalem. At this juncture, what did Isaiah do? Did he propose that Hezekiah negotiate a deal under which Judah’s Ministries of Tourism and Health would be moved elsewhere and sovereignty over the city would be shared with Assyria? No, what he did was to assure Hezekiah that if he held out against Sennacherib, no harm would come to Jerusalem because God would not permit it.
This belief in the inviolability of Jerusalem went very deep. Just how deep it went, we know from what would happen more than a century later to the prophet Jeremiah. Because he was warning that Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, would lay waste to Jerusalem if a rebellion were mounted against him, Jeremiah was accused of contradicting the promise of God to the people of Israel, and his political opponents advocated that he be put to death for the crime of blasphemy.
It was also in Jeremiah’s time, under the reign of Josiah as king of Judah, that the book which would later be known as Deuteronomy was found in the Temple of Solomon when repairs were being carried out there. Both the king and the people of Judah were already familiar with much of what was contained in that book; but there was also something new and startling. It was a prohibition, stated in the strongest possible terms, against offering sacrifices on any altar but the one in the Temple in Jerusalem.
The reason this was so startling was that, from the time of Abraham on down, a variety of altars had been built and dedicated to the God of Israel in a variety of places, and nowhere in the laws of the Torah as they were known at the time, or in any of the oracles and sermons of the prophets who had come earlier, had there been the remotest hint that there was anything wrong with offering sacrifices on them. Yet now God was commanding the destruction of all these altars and shrines wherever they might be located and however ancient they might be. From now on, there was to be no sacrificing and no celebration of the festivals anywhere except in Jerusalem. Jerusalem thus became not only the capital of Judah but also, so to speak, the capital of Judaism.
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In wondering about this singling-out of one city from among all the cities in the Land of Israel, I find myself ineluctably led into its larger and even more mysterious context, which is the singling-out of one people from among all the nations of the world. And in puzzling over this belief that the children of Israel, and their descendants who would in later centuries be called Jews, were the chosen people of God, I find myself relying for help on an intriguing Christian concept: the one that Christian theologians call the scandal of particularity.
There are many elaborate definitions of this concept. But in my opinion, it was most strikingly elucidated not in any theological disquisition but in a little jingle often wrongly attributed to the British writer Hilaire Belloc. Actually, it was written in the 1920’s by a British journalist named William Norman Ewer, and it goes like this: “How odd/of God/To choose/the Jews.”
Given the sly touch of anti-Semitic malice concealed beneath the whimsy of this jingle, it was inevitable that there should have been responses in kind. One of them, of uncertain authorship, runs: “But not so odd/as those who choose/A Jewish God/but spurn the Jews.” Another, also of uncertain authorship, is more succinct: “Not odd/of God./Goyim/annoy’m.”
Ewer, incidentally, was not only an anti-Semite; he was also, it has emerged from recently declassified files of MI5, a Soviet agent. Make of that what you will, a strange fact remains: in composing his jingle, this Soviet agent could have been speaking as a believing Christian who had no choice but to accept what the Bible told him; and the Bible told him that God had indeed chosen the Jews. Ewer thought this an oddity. But to weightier and more solemn Christian minds it was more than odd, it was nothing short of scandalous, that the one true God, the universal God, the God of all, should have singled out any one people on whom to bestow His special favor. And as if this were not scandal enough, the particular people he had singled out was the Jews: a scraggly tribe only just freed from slavery and now wandering in the desert.
True, the often bitter fruits of this special privilege would in the distant future sometimes lead the descendants of those scraggly wanderers in the desert to pray: “Dear God, please choose someone else for a change.” But that in itself could have been taken—at least by the humorless—as an updated version of their incessant complaining against God, so richly documented by the Book of Exodus, along with their readiness at every moment to rebel against the Law revealed to them at Sinai—the very Law that, through the instrumentality of God’s choice of them, would at the end of days be accepted by all mankind.
Of course, Jewish complaints against God have also come from those who adhere strictly to His law, and who are at a loss to understand why they have been punished instead of rewarded for it. We find such complaints magnificently expressed in the Book of Job, and by the prophets Jeremiah and Habakkuk, both of whom actually summon God to what would in later centuries be called a din Torah, a lawsuit before a rabbinical court, to answer precisely such charges. Nor did this end with the prophets. Perhaps the most deliciously poignant latter-day example we have is the 18th-century Yiddish folk song called the “kaddish” of Reb Levi Yitzhok of Berditchev, or A Din Toyreh mit Got. It goes in part like this:
Good morning to You, Master of the Universe,
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© 2009 Commentary Inc.
