The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Lévy

Author:Bernard-Henri Lévy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

THE SCENE

We have to go back to the verse.

The first.

The one where the whole story starts, with its knot of misapprehensions that will poison twenty centuries of relations with Christianity and fourteen with Islam but that has its own share of truth.

We are in Exodus.

The Israelites, having left Rephidim, are still far from the Promised Land.

They find themselves in the middle of the desert, in a spot so empty that it is almost abstract, the exact opposite of the Egypt they just left, which, to judge from the end of Genesis, is the very definition of fertility, prosperity, and culture.

They wander in anti-Egypt, where, after their bath in the goods and culture that were Pharaoh’s realm, after their long sojourn near the forty-nine Gates of Impurity in which they nearly perish, they experience an inner draining, an emptying, and, at bottom, a deliverance from the pagan immanentism that was dogging their feet and minds. And in contrast to the bodily but also social needs that were second nature to them, the Hebrew says that they are panoui—that is, at once vacant, free from the pleasures in which they were mired, ready for intellection.

They then arrive at the foot of an ordinary mountain—to tell the truth, not even a very high one (though soon it will be said that one could, from its base, see the glory of God at its summit) and poorly identified (even today it is not known with certainty whether the mountain is in Arabia, in present-day Jordan, in the southern Negev, or elsewhere).

Just a mountain.

A mountain with no history.

A mountain that is eventually converted, thanks to epics both literary and cinematographic, to a Middle Eastern version of Fuji or Kilimanjaro, whereas in fact it is a nothing mountain, abstract, being itself a form of desert that, like a desert, allows the mind to be limited by nothing, no landscape, no features—just a little high ground to serve as the site of the prophecy.

Because God, that day, called Moses to appear.

He made Moses climb, alone, the slope of the mount. And God told him two things that caused Moses to hurry back down the mountain to tell the twelve tribes that were waiting for him in the sand of the desert.

He told Moses this: “All the earth is mine.” Equally dear to my heart, without exception, are all of the peoples of the earth. I am the God of love of all the sons of Adam and thus of all the sons of Noah, who are, to this day, my equally beloved sons.

But before God told him that, there was this other thing: “You shall be for me a treasure.” Among all the sons of Adam and Noah is one human population that I call a treasure (segula, in Hebrew) and that I have placed “on eagle’s wings” so that they may be “brought to me.” I am God of all peoples, and I repeat that all peoples are equal in my heart. But there is one,

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