November 26, 2014--Sacred Spaces

I once had a colleague who for his doctoral dissertation wrote about scared spaces. Mainly those places that held special, spiritual meaning for native peoples. Places that they attempted to hide and if necessary defend against outsiders.

I asked him if there were equivalent places that were held to be scared by people in the so-called developed world. He smiled at me, as if to indicate how naive I was.

"Just look around you," he said.

"Even here in Midtown Manhattan?"

"Even here. During lunch let's walk over to Saint Patrick's Cathedral and look at the people worshipping there. Sense what that physical place means to them."

I didn't take up his offer but two years later, in Jerusalem, I understood all to well what a sacred space is and how those for whom it is sacred, who couldn't hide it from "outsiders," were willing, eager to defend it. Even to give up their lives to protect it from encroachment.

This was most emotionally vivid at the Western Wall. A sacred place to observant Jews who claim it is one of the walls of the Second Temple, which itself stood on the site of the even more sacred First Temple, constructed, it is believed, nearly 3,000 years ago by King Solomon. And it is at this very place where the Third and final temple will be built, the intra-orthodox fervently believe, when the Messiah appears.

They await him now and some are making preparations for his arrival, including moving in on the Al-Aqsa Mosque which sits on top of the Temple Mount, one of the most sacred places for Muslims, the place from which it is reported the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven. All of this not very far from a number of sacred places for Christians--the Via Dolorosa, the road along which Christ was said to have  borne the cross as he proceeded toward Calvary and the Church of Holy Sepulchre, which was built to mark the sacred place where he was crucified, entombed, and resurrected.

All of these places--central in meaning to Jews, Christians, and Muslims--are located literally within a square kilometer of each other. Those who are skeptical, even non-believers (me included) when there feel overwhelmingly that this is a special place, charged with spiritual power.

A sacred space, a site where our search for meaning, truth, and divine inspiration commingles with religious beliefs and practices in the attempt to find the most fundamental of answers--just what my long-ago colleague was attempting to get me to understand.

How then, with so much at stake, in the world's most-contested piece of real estate can there ever be a resolution to the conflict between Israeli Jews and Muslim Palestinians, both claiming, in the flow of blood, that they have special rights and historical, divine, prerogatives for exclusive control of the place that one side calls the Temple Mount and the other the Dome of the Rock?

This is not a situation where compromise and splitting-the-difference has much chance of working.