To the late Bezalel Narkiss—for many years the acknowledged dean of the history of Jewish art—any depiction of animals in medieval Jewish manuscripts was merely decorative, a case of borrowing from non-Jewish iconography devoid of any specific symbolism. Marc Michael Epstein takes the opposite position, one he first arrived at thanks to a single illustration, as he writes:

[At] the Israel Museum, I saw a magnificent 15th-century Ashkenazi siddur open to the folio containing the powerful first phrase of the tractate known as “Ethics of the Fathers”: “Moses received the Torah at Sinai, and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua [transmitted it] to the Elders, and the Elders to the Men of the Great Assembly.” The word Moses was elaborately illuminated, and above it stood a black dog, relatively large given the [overall] size of the page. . . .

Dogs abound in medieval Jewish manuscripts. Lapdogs accompany Pharaoh and the Egyptians in the Rylands Haggadah (Catalonia, 14th century). In the Kaufmann Haggadah (Iberia, second half of the 14th century), a tongueless dog barks representing the effects of God’s redeeming power during the Exodus when “not a dog shall whet his tongue at the Children of Israel” (Exodus 11:6–7). A dog chases a hare in another example, right under the rubric, “And the Egyptians pressured us” (Sarajevo Haggadah, Aragon, c. 1320–1335). In all of these cases, the dog is clearly a symbol for the Egyptians, or the enemies of the Jews more generally. . . .

The typical range of meanings for dogs—hunters, pursuers, enemies—is corroborated in Jewish texts. There, dogs represent, for the most part, the pursuing, rapacious enemies of the Jews. “Dogs surround me; a pack of evil ones closes in on me” (Psalms 22:17). How are we, then, to understand a black dog atop the word “Moses”? . . .

[I]f this particular dog is “read” according to the traditions of medieval animal lore and of common wisdom, what better metaphor could we have for the loyal transmission of the divine mandate from generation to generation than the loyal and obedient dog? And what better symbol for Moses himself, called by God “faithful throughout My household” (Numbers 12:7)?

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.