Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi: Figuring Jerusalem: Politics and Poetics in the Sacred Center. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. ISBN: 9780226787466

A decade ago, in the summer of 2014, the bodies of three Israeli teenagers, Eyal Yifrach, Gil-Ad Shaar, and Naftali Fraenkel, were discovered after nearly three agonizing weeks of searching. The three had been kidnapped from Gush Etzion by Hamas terrorists and murdered shortly after that. Upon the recovery of the bodies, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened a Security Cabinet meeting with the following statement: “Vengeance for the blood of a small child, Satan has not yet devised; nor for the blood of innocent young boys who were on their way to meet their parents, but will never get to see them again” (emphasis mine).^[1] The line in italics is a quote from a poem known to nearly every graduate of the Israeli educational system: Hayim Nahman Bialik’s “On the Slaughter” (Al hashehita), composed by Israel’s national poet in response to the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. It is a poem of seething wrath and profound frustration, in which the speaker – a poetic representative of the Jewish victims – accuses God of permitting the horrendous events and harshly condemns divine incompetence. Yet, outraged as he is, the speaker unequivocally rejects any thought of revenge:

And cursed be he who cries out: Revenge!

Vengeance for the blood of a small child,

Satan has yet to devise.

Preparing Israeli public opinion for yet another cycle of mutual bloodshed between Israel and Hamas, Netanyahu (cunningly? absentmindedly?) omitted the first line of this half-stanza, citing only the remaining two lines. The poem’s warning against any act of human vengeance was thus cut out, leaving us with the bubbling fury that could culminate only in an act of retribution. Over the past decade, this truncated stanza has seamlessly embedded itself into the fabric of Israeli political discourse. Today, not many remember the original intent of Bialik’s reproach.

On the face of it, there is nothing particularly extraordinary here; cynical politicians are (in)famous for their propensity to distort and manipulate sources to serve their agendas. “Misreadings” like Netanyahu’s have always been effective in diverting and redirecting the minds of the masses while nurturing nationalistic sentiments and collective fears. Within the broader Jewish context, such misreadings are nothing new either; they have appeared repeatedly throughout Jewish history, playing a pivotal role in the formation, transformation, and reaffirmation of Jewish collective identity. However, in the modern Jewish-Israeli context, these misreadings take on a more hazardous character, converging with the resurgence of nationalistic messianic sentiments that have gained traction in significant segments of Israeli society since 1967, following the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem and the resulting unmediated proximity to the holy center. It is at this perilous juncture that Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi’s recently published book, Figuring Jerusalem: Politics and Poetics in the Sacred Center, is situated. In this bold and compelling study, DeKoven Ezrahi explores the dangerous outcomes of this messianic eruption from the perspective of the now marginalized and repressed Jewish “mimetic imagination,” which had once acted as a safeguard against these destructive messianic forces.

What is the “Jewish mimetic imagination”? According to DeKoven Ezrahi, it is the creative energy of the ancient Hebrews and the Jews in the diaspora, a collective literary mechanism of mediation and moderation, that throughout the ages was tasked with maintaining the distance between the Jews and the perils of proximity to the toxic and intoxicating allure of the sacred (4).

Naturally, one is inclined to ponder: is proximity to the sacred indeed so hazardous? Can a people’s collective literary creation function as a trans-generational gatekeeper, keeping the lurking danger at bay? Or, to use DeKoven Ezrahi’s own terms: can the collective literary imagination generate an effective centrifugal counter-motion to resist the centripetal pull of the divine? (179) Can a metaphor, symbol, allegory, or fable adequately substitute for the enflamed fantasies of unmediated contact with the sacred?

These and other questions form the framework of DeKoven Ezrahi’s insightful study, as it settles atop the ancient walls of The City of God, Jerusalem, to observe from a high vantage point the permutations that Jewish imagination has experienced throughout the ages. Indeed, as its title indicates, the book’s subject consists of two components – alongside and counter to Jerusalem, the restless mechanisms of figuration operate, ceaselessly endeavoring to divert the perils embedded in this city’s allure. The result is a dazzling succession of literary surrogates and substitutions that attests to the fact that Jewish mimetic imagination is more than a mere instrument of expression for the collective national aspirations, cravings, and fears of the Jewish unconscious. Rather, it is an active agent assigned the task of protecting its people from ever getting too close to the “event horizon” of the sacred. Thus, the chronicles of the Holy City are intertwined with the products of the mimetic faculties that sought to keep Jerusalem close to the heart yet at a safe distance.

DeKoven Ezrahi begins her discussion at a time that predates Jerusalem as we know it. However, the geography remains unchanged, and the ground on which the great walls of the city of God would eventually rise is already suffused with the mysterious electricity of the divine. Over two thousand years before Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “misreading,” a story was written that would become the subject of far too many, and at times tragic, misreadings. Known as the Akedah, or “The Binding of Isaac,” this story would soon assume a pivotal role in shaping the catastrophic aspects of Jewish collective consciousness for generations to come. As a primary example of the poetics of substitution, this primordial narrative represents a foundational moment in Jewish history for DeKoven Ezrahi. This is precisely why the recurrent misreadings of this story carry such a tragic undertone: reading it correctly, i. e., literally (34), could have ushered in, perhaps, an entirely different Jewish episteme. DeKoven Ezrahi reminds us that Isaac was not sacrificed at the end of the story but instead substituted with a ram. At this critical juncture on Mt. Moriah – the future site of the Holy City, according to certain religious and literary traditions – an act of substitution occurs that will define the modus operandi of Jewish mimetic imagination henceforth. Abraham’s son continues to live and plays a crucial role as a key figure in the emerging lineage of the Israelites. The ancient author devised a highly potent mechanism of proxy and exchange. Why, then, this enduring insistence on a sacrifice that never took place?^[2]

But there is more to it. Building on the work of scholars such as the American Biblical historian J. William Whedbee, DeKoven Ezrahi’s literal reading – guided primarily by a nuanced philological analysis of words derived from Yitzhak’s Hebrew root צח"ק – unveils an unexpected comic leitmotif that connects the Akedah with other chapters in the Book of Genesis surrounding the story. In DeKoven Ezrahi’s masterful reading, the Akedah emerges as the climax of a grander narrative, where most of the tears shed are, in fact, tears of laughter rather than sorrow. Beyond the hermeneutical radicalism of this reading, its political subversiveness speaks volumes.

In all subsequent narratives examined by DeKoven Ezrahi throughout the book, acts of substitution and exchange play a crucial role in steering us away from the perils of proximity (the Hebrew verb lehakriv, “to sacrifice,” literally means to create proximity or to bring something closer): from The Song of Songs which persistently obscures the backdrop of the Holy City in favor of the erotic corporeality of human love; through the doctrine of negative attributes espoused by Maimonides, who imposes severe limitations on human language as it seeks out God; to Yehuda Amichai, “the poet of the sacred quotidian,” (177) who, in his effort to break the force-field of sanctity enveloping his hometown, Jerusalem, employs sophisticated poetic dialogism to secularize the sacred and sanctify the mundane (182–185).

Aside from the powerful readings presented in Figuring Jerusalem, the volume is rich with profound insights, astute observations, and intriguing literary, historical, and political anecdotes. Although the book follows a chronological structure – beginning with two biblical narratives and concluding with the prose of Agnon and the poetry of Amichai – DeKoven Ezrahi’s discussions move back and forth across various timelines freely, thus uncovering latent echoes and correspondences between different texts and authors. As the book’s subtitle announces, DeKoven Ezrahi does not limit her analysis to the purely literary and speculative. Rather, her compelling argument gains both vividness and momentum through the direct link she establishes between her readings and their political implications, both in the past and, most importantly, in the present. Poetics and politics are intimately intertwined, she tells us, and a thoughtful and cautious application of poetics to the political sphere could be highly beneficial, especially today, in the age of forgetfulness. When mediation is undermined by an unrestrained desire for absolute proximity and violent claims to ownership; when vulgar, short-sighted actualization replaces literary longings; when mimesis is abandoned in favor of a fervent messianism fueled by an incurable sense of permanent victimhood – under these conditions, the clock on the geopolitical “tinderbox of history” (1) begins to tick. All we can hope is that amidst these jarring ticking sounds, another voice may also be heard.