Welcome to the Tikva podcast on great Jewish essays and ideas.

I'm your host, Eric Cohen.

I'm very pleased to be joined today by Norman Pahoritz,

one of the most interesting and important intellectuals, editors, and Jewish figures of the last half century.

He was the editor of Commentary Magazine from 1960 to 1995, and he's the prolific author of books and essays

on American politics and culture, on literature, on Judaism, and even occasionally about himself.

Norman, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having you.

Our subject today is a wonderful essay that you wrote back in 2007 called Jerusalem,

The Scandal of Particularity. And I thought we'd start with the Jerusalem part of your title.

Jerusalem is obviously an ancient and modern city. It's an idea. It sits at the bloody

crossroads of Middle Eastern politics. You describe it in the essay as not only the capital of

Judah, but also the capital of Judaism. So what is Jerusalem? Well, Jerusalem became the capital

of Judaism, in addition to being the capital of the kingdom of Judah,

at a period when there were, of course, two kingdoms, the southern and northern, northern kingdom of Israel,

which became the ten lost tribes eventually.

Jerusalem had achieved that status, partly because of its role in the

Bible as the center for the temple that was going to be built someday. But when the book of Deuteronomy was discovered in the, I guess it was

the 7th century, B.C.E. It turned out that there was a prohibition against sacrificing

anywhere but on the altar within the temple in Jerusalem.

Despite the fact that there were altars much more ancient than the one in Jerusalem,

and there had never been any, not a hint from anyone,

that it would be forbidden to sacrifice there.

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