Figuring Jerusalem

While all three Abrahamic religions revere Jerusalem, its history as the site of the First and Second Temples makes it Judaism’s holiest city; the belief that presence at the Western Wall or on the Temple Mount offers proximity to the divine exists in tension with the idea of God’s ubiquity in most Jews’ consciousness. Therefore, many Jews experience sublime feelings when following the folk custom of placing notes to God between the Western Wall’s stones or praying beside it together with thousands of others on a pilgrimage festival.

Most scholars of religion would view a desire for such unmediated experience of the divine as a legitimate and natural thing that Jews share with practitioners of other religions. Yet, in the fundamentally polemical Figuring Jerusalem: Politics and Poetics in the Sacred Center, Sidra Ezrahi paints such a desire as unethical and endeavors to advance mediated experience of the sacred as an ethical model that should be adopted by contemporary Israeli Jews. Only such a model, she asserts, can counteract the inevitably destructive effects of exclusivist Israeli Jewish attitudes concerning Jerusalem, as well as the Temple Mount, which Jewish fundamentalists have sought to integrate into their religious experience more fully, including through ascendence to it and prayer there.

Implicit in Ezrahi’s call is the belief that territorial compromise providing Palestinians sovereignty over some part of Jerusalem and shared possession over the Temple Mount and the Holy Basin offers the best opportunity for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. This might be true, but when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered this to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in 2008, Abbas rejected it. Consequently, Ezrahi fails to present any way out of the current political impasse that her book purports to address and her criticism of the widely despised Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and a suspect group of Jewish fundamentalists seems moot.

Nonetheless, despite Ezrahi’s limitations as a political analyst and her problematic assertion that Jews possessing an emotional connection to the Temple Mount are driven by “idolatrous impulses” (26), she proves a skilled reader of texts and a talented writer who advances her argument through thought-provoking readings of three premodern Jewish texts (the Binding of Isaac narrative found in Genesis 22, the Song of Songs, and Maimonides’ The Guide of the Perplexed) and the prose and poetry depicting and referencing Jerusalem written by Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1887-1970) and Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000), respectively. Inevitably, these readings, rather than this book’s overarching argument, will attract readers.

Generally, Ezrahi’s readings go against the grain of earlier interpretations and scholarship, and most readers will find them provocative but not wholly convincing. Ezrahi’s discussion of the Binding of Isaac narrative exemplifies this. As many readers know, it tells how God tried Abraham by commanding him to go and sacrifice his son Isaac. Over time, this prescribed sacrifice became associated with Mt. Moriah, the site where 2 Chronicles 3 tells us “the house of the Lord” was built. Consequently, those seeking an unmediated experience of the divine have come to view the Temple Mount as emblematic of sublime experience that is achievable exclusively through unwavering devotion and sacrifice.

Finding this view anathema, Ezrahi advances a midrashic reading of this seminal story to promote an alternative figuration of the Temple Mount that she views as more conducive to peace. Since Isaac is not sacrificed, she asserts, the story should be understood as comedy, with its happy ending grounded in the provision of a substitute—something that opens up a viable space between the fire of sacrifice and the quotidian, where mediated experience of the sacred can be achieved. Diasporic Jews long thrived in such a space and Ezrahi believes that Israeli Jews would do well to imitate them. In this way, Genesis 22 could cease to “animate the Hebrew imagination as a topos of martyrdom” (54), and instead could be more productively understood as a story where “human intervention and mediation, plus a heavy dose of patience” (43), promote a more positive future. While Ezrahi’s homily, the motivation behind its creation, and its message are legitimate, characterizing Genesis 22 as comedy, or for that matter tragedy, diminishes a text better understood without such generic limitations. The tension between the ways that the sacrificial attempt negatively affects Abraham, Isaac, and Sarah and the covenantal relationship that God enters into with Abraham and his descendents after a stop is put to the attempt proves fundamental to the story’s multifaceted beauty.

Ezrahi’s presentation of how Amichai challenged extremist and fanatical views through his depictions of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount proves the most convincing and insightful part of her book. Carefully selected passages from Amichai’s poetry, such as snippets from his magnificent poem cycle “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Why Jerusalem?,” seamlessly advance the points that Ezrahi looks to make. Furthermore, her discussion builds on earlier work on Amichai’s poetry, such as literary scholar Chana Kronfeld’s presentation of him as a poet actively challenging Israeli norms (The Full Severity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Stanford University Press, 2016).

Ezrahi’s argument that Amichai’s figuration of Jerusalem constitutes part of efforts within Hebrew writing since the Hebrew Bible to promote a mediated experience of the divine, however, proves unconvincing. This important phenomenon constitutes part of a larger trend within secular Israeli poetry to counter increasingly strident ethnonationalism that challenges the universalistic and cosmopolitan values that dominated pre-state Palestinian Jewish society and Hebrew culture. For example, the sentiments in Meir Wieseltier’s famous “Poem on Jerusalem” parallel those found in Amichai’s Jerusalem poetry. What sets Amichai apart is his challenging of extremism through figuration of Jerusalem prior to 1967. In “The Place Where We Are Right,” for example, Amichai links monolithic views that operate like compacted earth to prevent anything from growing to the causes of the Second Temple’s destruction. Then he presents loves and doubts as soil aerators, like moles or plows, that can promote new growth. As such, a plurality of ideas paves the way for a utopian Temple reconstruction.

Hebrew literary scholars will certainly appreciate Ezrahi’s contribution to scholarly understanding of Amichai’s figuration of Jerusalem, but Ezrahi raises an important question worthy of broad consideration: in what ways has the creation of the State of Israel transformed Judaism? Indeed, Jewish fundamentalism promoted by those looking for an unmediated experience of the divine proves new, but Judaism has undergone more thorough change in the last seventy-five years and Israel’s overarching role in these changes awaits its chronicler.  

Philip Hollander is a Hebrew lecturer at Princeton University.

Philip Hollander

Date Of Review:

April 17, 2024