Cynthia Ozick

what was missing in the glory that was Greece was metaphor… You will say, What? A nation of myth and you claim it has no metaphor? Aren’t myths the greatest metaphors of all?… how humanly resplendent: each god represents an aspect of human passion. Here is beauty, here is lust, here is wisdom, here is chance, here is courage, here is mendacity, here is war, and so on and so on. Isn’t that metaphoric enough for you?

“Observe: there is no god or goddess who stands for the still small voice of conscience.”

Lev. 24:22 “You shall have one manner of law, the same for the stranger as for the home-born.” …this precept of loving the stranger appears 36 times in the Pentateuch. It is there because a moral connection has been made with the memory of bondage… Without the metaphor of memory and history, we cannot imagine the life of the Other…

In the absence of this metaphoric capability, what are the consequences? Nowhere beyond the reach of the Pentateuch did the alien and the home-born live under the same code. The Romans originally had a single word, hostis, to signify both enemy and stranger, in early Roman law, every alien was classed as an enemy, devoid of rights. In Germanic law the alien was rechtsunfahig, a pariah with no access to justice. The Greeks made slaves of the stranger and then taunted him with barks. There have been and still are, religio-political systems that have incorporated the teaching of contempt, turning the closest neighbors into the most despised strangers – a loathing expressed in words like, “untouchable”, dhimmi,” “diecide”. In our own country, slavery thrived under the wing of a freedom-proclaiming Constitution… And in 1945, a British camera on a single day in a single German deathcamp just liberated photographed a bulldozer sweeping into five pits 5,000 starved and abused human corpses at a time, a thousand to a pit, all of them having been judged unfit for the right to live.