613 Mitzvot

The 613 Mitzvot, the traditional rabbinic enumeration of the commandments that bind Jewish life, stand at the center of City of God's most sustained theological argument. The number itself is a convention rather than a scriptural given: the rabbis of antiquity derived it from the Torah's 365 negative prohibitions and 248 positive obligations, a tally that has functioned for centuries as the framework within which observant Jews decide which sacred duties are binding and which may be dispensed with. In Doctorow's novel, this ancient apparatus of religious law becomes the live question of a Friday-night gathering at the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, where the congregation's seminar on the codes of conduct turns into a searching debate over what the tradition demands of a modern believer. The scene is framed by the narrator's observation that the room was jammed, with some thirty people present, and that Sarah Blumenthal, in rabbinical black with the robe open over her street clothes, sat before the Torah still in its simple vestment, conducting the discussion as a kind of seminar rather than a sermon. Thomas Pemberton, the former Episcopal priest in the midst of his conversion, sat in the first row, and the narrator watched him turn in his chair and glare at every questioner, a detail that reveals how personally Pem took each challenge to the faith he was embracing.