If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem

For an American born since 1949, whether Jewish or not, a profound and sympathetic understanding of the Jews, both as a people and a faith, is not a nugatory obligation: it is absolutely vital.  Even beyond the invincible fact that all the mansions of Christ rest upon Jewish foundations, every ethical human being is obligated to study the Jews because of their vast contribution to morality, one that is unique and uniquely absorbing, as the most cursory examination of the Tanakh will amply demonstrate.

And yet, my own exposure to Jewish traditions and Jewish thought has been massively conflicted.  Whereas Huston Smith reveals himself to be an unapologetic enthusiast, political events in the Middle East since his book first appeared in 1958 have inevitably served to temper any incipient adoration on my own part.  The Palestinian people appear to languish in a condition which some would say parallels that of the Hebrews at the beginning of the Book of Exodus:  downtrodden, economically subservient, a forgotten people without hope of redemption.  I will address three objections to Smith's essentially triumphalist description of Judaism in the paragraphs that follow.

First, the efficacy of the notion that God acts on behalf of Israel in historical time, and reveals his wishes for his chosen people through historical events, obviously must stand or fall based upon the demonstrable historicity of the Biblical accounts, but especially on the twin stories of the Covenant with Abraham and the epic of the Exodus, up to the revelation of the Pentateuch and the conquest of the Promised Land.  The first is an essentially private experience, no more provable or disprovable than the Buddha's awakening or the revelation of the Koran to Mohammed, so I will concentrate on the second.  While Biblical archaeology is a vast subject, my preliminary look at the question reveals that there is anything but concensus among the experts as to whether the event is or is not purely mythical; even among those who believe that the evidence supports it, dating of the Exodus varies from the Sixth Dynasty all the way forward to the Nineteenth, a span of some thirteen hundred years.  Since the deciphering of the Rosetta stone by Champollion, Egyptologists have largely dispelled the clouds of mystery that had heretofore hung over the Pyramids and the Sphinx, and there seems to be no evidence from any of the hieroglyphic inscriptions to assist in narrowing down this inexplicably vague answer to what should be, in a culture as literate as the Egyptian has turned out to be, a relatively simple question of dating what is described in the Old Testament as a vastly significant, even civilization-altering series of paranormal events.

Second, the ethical primacy of the Jews among the peoples of the Mediterranean world is called into doubt by the disturbing litany of conquests and massacres detailed in the Book of Joshua.  It seems irrelevant to me whether Jahweh authorized the extermination of the Canaanites or not; if the Sixth Commandment applies only to the Jews, while allowing them unfettered license to murder non-Jews, then the universality of Jewish ethical theory is irremediably compromised.

Finally, the question of Jewish exceptionalism, which Smith attempts to dismiss, I regard as a serious obstacle.  Any objective reading of the Tanakh leaves no doubt that Jahweh holds the Jews in a condition of especial esteem and that this esteem makes them superior to all other peoples on earth, none else of whom having been dignified with a covenant:  the Jews are to regard themselves as absolutely unique, and deservedly so.  As I mentioned in my entry of 1SEP09, a narrowly circumscribed religious dictum cannot, almost by definition, be held to possess an all-encompassing truth.

All of which leads me to remark, like the surfers of the Pumphouse Gang, very mysterioso.

358 days, 50 novels, 49 books of non-fiction to go.