In his epic poem Paradise Lost, the 17th-century English poet and philosopher John Milton sought to retell the opening chapters of Genesis in the style of Homer and Vergil—needless to say, through a decidedly Calvinist lens. Dov Lerner, an Orthodox rabbi, explains what makes this poem so powerful:

All of his poetic predecessors, from classical Greece to Spenserian Britain, use words to paint pictures that celebrate war. But for Milton, war is simply unworthy. Despite his strenuous defense of regicide and his vindication of a parliamentary rebellion, he sees war as occasionally necessary, but rarely the province of nobility. Myths of monumental conflicts and tales of fights and feasts and steeds and knights are, in Milton’s words, “Not that which justly gives Heroic name to Person or to Poem.”

For Milton, true virtue is found not in the defeat of others but in the mastery of the self, not in armed conflict but in contesting temptation, in what he calls “the better fortitude of Patience.” And this alone is the proper subject of epic poetry. In book after book of Paradise Lost, . . . Milton dismantles the celebration of mortal combat so paradigmatic of Homer and Virgil—depicting belligerence as the blemish of the weak, and resilience as the sign of the strong.

Milton is the first, and in some ways the greatest, to turn the genre on its head, in ways that make his work not just brilliant, . . . but deeply biblical—and not simply as a consequence of its cast. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues, . . . Judaism’s most important moral contribution to the West is “not the clash of titans on the field of battle, but the quiet inner drama of choice and will, restraint and responsibility.” And it is precisely this contribution that Milton absorbs, along with his Puritan peers, and sets at the epicenter of his poem.

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.