"Spengler" on Jerusalem

Why a hilltop fortress taken by King David three thousand years ago should occasion so much turmoil in world politics is a source of wonder, and wondering about it helps makes sense of politics as they really are, and not as the Enlightenment presented them to us. Today on the Hebrew calendar is the 28th of Iyar, a minor religious holiday proclaimed by the Israeli rabbinate after the unification of Jerusalem in 1967.

Jerusalem is a beautiful city, not least because the British Mandate had the aesthetic sense to insist that all construction employ Jerusalem stone, a pinkish granite that in the sunset produces the tones of gold and copper celebrated in the city’s famous anthem. What is most beautiful about Jerusalem is the people of Jerusalem who have returned after so many years. It is a religious city, quieter and more modest than raucous Tel Aviv, but with a glow and intensity that I have seen nowhere else.

States are not founded on social contracts, protection of the individual, or any such idiocy handed down from Hobbes; they are founded upon congregations, as Augustine explained in the City of God. It is not common interest but common love that defines states. We do not have a “self” interest as such; our “self” belongs to our ancestors and our children, unless, of course, we are contemporary Europeans, who despise our ancestors and have no children, and hope to pass into extinction with the minimum of bother.

From Jerusalem came the most persuasive promise humankind had ever heard, namely the promise of eternal life–not the fragile immortality of the pagan gods, whose doom already was sealed by fate in the myths of all the peoples, but life with God past the dissolution of the physical world. The world will wear out and God will discard it like a cloak, Psalm 102 sings, but the Lord will establish his servants forever.