One Holy Land, Three Holy Peoples
Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Regard for the Holy City
Lecture by Dr. Reuven Firestone
October 20, 2002
UMass Amherst
I'm going to talk about one of the most contentious issues at the center of this current Intifada, which, in Arabic is called Intifadat al-Aqsa: the "Quaking of Jerusalem." About two years ago, Jerusalem celebrated its 3,000th birthday, according to Ehud Ohlmert, the mayor of Jerusalem. It was 3,000 years ago that King David established Jerusalem as the capital of the united monarchy of ancient Israel. It was King David who built the royal residence in Jerusalem. David purchased the land upon which the great Temple would be built from Arauna, a Jebusite. This Arauna, according to 2 Samuel, was perhaps the king of Jerusalem before David conquered it. Arauna owned a threshing-floor on the hill that would become the Temple Mount.
But Jerusalem was a sacred city long before King David. According to Genesis 14, Abraham, 800 years before David, was once greeted by a man named named Malchei-Tzedek, priest of a god known as El Elyon, the "most high God." This priest was from the city of Shalem, which biblical scholars believe is Jerusalem.
So Jerusalem should have celebrated its 3,800th birthday, at least. Its sanctity may indeed go back much farther into the mists of earliest human pre-history. It did not originate with the Israelites.
What gave Jerusalem its sanctity? Could it be that it was an ancient abode of the gods? Was it the clear air in Jerusalem that makes one feel almost as if you could reach out and touch heaven? Was it that golden light at sunset that reflects off the red hills Edom, just across the Jordan River, bathing the city in a sheen of pure gold? Or could it have been the miracle of the Gihon Spring, that phenomenal source of water that literally pours out of the ground by the thousands of gallons per hour, all year long, as if it were a gift from God—a gift of life out of the dry Judean Desert?
Whatever the origin of its sanctity, Jerusalem has become a sacred center for the largest number of religious adherents on this earth. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all revere the city, and all consider it their holy city. Each religious civilization claims Jerusalem for itself, but the meaning of its sanctity differs for each as well. In the next few minutes, we'll examine how Judaism, Christianity and Islam regards the city of Jerusalem.
Christian Regard for Jerusalem
We'll begin with Christianity, which is the easiest. It would not always have been so, say in the Middle Ages during the period of the Crusades, but in those days Christians had a sense of themselves as a continental religious civilization, with a universal political as well as religious destiny. That destiny included, at the very least, physical control over the holy sites in the Holy Land. Today, however, this is not so. After the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the growth of secular nationalism, Christianity is no longer a "Super-Church" with political and military goals. Christianity has evolved and transformed itself into a multiplicity of faiths that today, more than Judaism or Islam, try to separate between Church and State, rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's" (Matthew 22:21).
Another way of stating it is that according to Christianity, there are two Jerusalems. There is the heavenly Jerusalem - the Jerusalem of the spirit, and the earthly Jerusalem - the Jerusalem of the flesh. Although the earthly Jerusalem, the physical Jerusalem, was and remains today of real importance, it is really only because it represents the heavenly Jerusalem, the Jerusalem of the spirit.
I will share a story with you that will illustrate what I mean. Even in the year 1129, at the time of the Crusades when there was little separating Church and State in Europe, and the Crusaders were engaged in holy wars commanded by the Church, an Englishman named Philip, from the English diocese of Lincoln, set out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. On his way to Jerusalem he stopped at Clairvaux in France. Shortly afterwards, the Bishop of Lincoln received a letter from the Abbot of Clairvaux, announcing the good tidings that Philip had arrived safely and very quickly at his destination, and that he intended to remain there permanently. "He has entered the holy city and has chosen his heritage....He is no longer an inquisitive onlooker but a devout inhabitant and an enrolled citizen of Jerusalem." But this Jerusalem, "if you want to know, is Clairvaux. She is the Jerusalem united to the one in heaven by whole-hearted devotion, by conformity of life, and by a certain spiritual affinity."
Christians cherish Jerusalem and the sites in Israel as a "holy land," because it was in this area that miracles depicted in the New Testament occurred. It was here that Jesus walked. Christians have come on pilgrimage from the earliest days to visit the sites associated with the birth, the mission, and the passion of their Savior. They find great spiritual uplift in the places associated with the mystery of salvation, and feel a blessing in walking in the footsteps of their Lord. But this represents a shift from allegiance to a geographical center to a personal center, for it is the personal act, not the communal or national act, of walking in those footsteps, that finds spiritual meaning for the individual believer. This represents, if you will, a "de-territorialization." Even the earthly Jerusalem is representative of the heavenly Jerusalem. With only a few exceptions, this separation has been made in Christianity. As a faith system—not a religio-ethnic or religio-national civilization, Christians revel in the holy sites, but with few exceptions, do not find the need to "possess" those spiritual sites.
Jewish Regard for the Land of Israel
Many liberal Jews feel similarly, for they have inherited the legacy of the Renaissance, the Christian Reformation, Enlightenment, and secularization of Western Europe. Until the shock of the Holocaust, most Jews throughout the world felt no great need to possess or be in political control of the Land of Israel.
For most Jews today, connection with the Land of Israel is through the State of Israel. This is partly a response to the horrors of the Holocaust, where the State of Israel has come to represent our universal miklat, or shelter, for Jews anywhere in the world who are in trouble. Jews' connection with Israel also results from a deep and almost tribal affinity with our extended family of compatriots in Israel. Liberal Jews are also connected to the land in some independent spiritual sense, but I doubt if it has a power that is much different from that of many Christians, aside from the fact that Jews connect to Massada and the Western Wall rather than Bethlehem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Jewish tradition, however, places great emphasis on the Land of Israel and especially on Jerusalem, the city which not only exists in our tradition in its own right, but which also serves as a symbol of the land as a whole.
Jerusalem is the very place in which God was understood to have dwelt when the Temple was standing in the holy city, and references in the Torah, especially in the book of Deuteronomy, repeatedly refer to Jerusalem as "the place where God chooses His divine name to dwell." Jerusalem is therefore intimately associated in Jewish tradition with the very divinity itself.
I could cite for you dozens of references to the sanctity of Jerusalem from our liturgy in the prayer book, from our daily blessings and prayers after eating; I could cite the Talmud and Midrash, and of course the many biblical references to the importance of Jerusalem to Jews and to Judaism.
But I won't. Because you have heard them. Suffice it to say that our tradition has never relinquished the sanctity of Jerusalem and the Land of Israel for Jews.
Jewish images of Jerusalem are closely tied up with ideas of redemption, with restoration of Jewish self-government, and with the commonality of the Jewish people. We Jews are a tribal people, and the Jewish sense of wholeness is associated with the wholeness of Jerusalem, if not at the present, then certainly in the End of Days.
But these associations with Jerusalem in our tradition are not typically expressed in terms of real history. On the contrary, the expressions of longing for the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the ingathering of the exiles are way off in an eschatological future. Jewish tradition for the past 2,000 years has rarely hinted at a political or military movement to reclaim Jerusalem and the Land of Israel.
The destruction of the Temple and the resultant Exile were interpreted by the rabbis as divine judgments, which must be accepted by us Jews. The few times that attempts were made to bring back the exiles through our own actions met with horrible disasters, so the dream tended to remain exactly that—a dream, a fantasy. And because the results of the failed Jewish political and military movements in real history were so horribly destructive to Jewish lives, the rabbis tried to prevent the development of Jewish political movements to reclaim Jerusalem in real history. They were attempting to avert future disasters.
This would change with the coming of modernity, for modernity radically altered many traditional Jewish concepts. The image of Jerusalem as a political rather than spiritual capital of the Jewish people was revived with Zionism.
Zionism was not founded on principles of Judaism, but rather on principles of modern nationalism, and especially the Romantic nationalist ideas of mid-late 19th century Europe. Secular Zionists invoked the spiritual images of Jerusalem imbedded in the tradition in order to rally Jews behind the Zionist enterprise, and to a certain extent it worked, even among secular Jews. Thus we observe with Zionism, a re-politicization of the centrality of Jerusalem, evocative of the political status of the holy city during the period of the Davidic Kings or the Maccabees.
The result is that today, we note a variety of Jewish attachments to Jerusalem. A very few Jews have retained the non- or even anti-political position of Jewish tradition that tries to dissociate Jerusalem from politics—to keep it a holy city but not a political center of the Jewish people. Others want Jerusalem to be the political capital of Israel with all the trappings of a great national capital, but not a holy city with all of its trappings. Others want to see both, and it is, in part, this tensions that we observe among Israelis today who argue over the Jewish future of Jerusalem. But the overwhelming majority of modern Jews feel that Jerusalem must remain within the political and military control of the modern State of Israel. Although this is a modern sensibility that may be somewhat contrary to the view of mainstream Rabbinic Judaism since the time of Rabbi Akiva of the Mishnah, it hearkens back to biblical roots, when Jerusalem was symbolic of the political as well as spiritual nation of Israel.
Islamic Regard for Palestine
Islam's association with Jerusalem begin quite early. The Muslims conquered Jerusalem in 638, very early in the great Conquest of Islam, and only 6 years after the death of the Prophet, Muhammad. According to tradition, when the great and pious Caliph Umar conquered Jerusalem, the Temple Mount area was a garbage dump, established as such by the Christian rulers of Jerusalem in order to publicly demonstrate the end of God's covenant with the Jews. The Temple Mount was the remnant of the great Jewish Temple, so the putrid smells and unpleasant sight of the place was supposed to remind the inhabitants and visitors to Jerusalem of the ascendance of Christianity and God's rejection of Judaism.
But a strange thing happened with the Islamic conquest of the city. According to the legend, Umar was given a tour of the city by the Christian Patriarch, Sophronius. When Umar saw what had been done to the Temple Mount, he personally rolled up the sleeves of his jalabiyya and led his people in a clean-up of the entire area. A temporary mosque was immediately established on the holy site. Contrary to Christianity, Islam regarded the Temple area as a sacred place from earliest times.
Fifty years later, in 691, the Umayyad Caliph, Abd al-MŒlik [al-Malik], constructed the Dome of the Rock as a great shrine—not a mosque—which demonstrated the hegemony of Islam over the Holy City. The Dome of the Rock is the oldest Islamic monument still in existence, and the third-most sacred site in the world of Islam.
The Al-Aq§Œ [Al-Aqsa] Mosque was built a few decades later. Its original structure was twice the size of the present building, but burned down already centuries ago. The Arabic names for Jerusalem are Bayt al-Maqdis ... al-bayt al-muqaddas ... or simply al-Quds
(the holy).
Islam achieved religious and political control over Jerusalem from very early on in its history. Unlike Christianity, or Rabbinic Judaism, the Muslims did not merely have a spiritual connection with a land controlled politically by the hated Roman Empire. The Islamic connection is quite concrete, and based on political control. In fact, Palestine has been situated in the heartland of the Islamic World for nearly 1500 years. The Islamic connection is not only "spiritual," but very much "temporal" as well.
Along with the incredible successes of the Islamic Conquests came a sense, certainly logical at the time, that God was in fact ensuring the great triumph of Islam. Even Jews and Christians who witnessed the incredible steamroller of the Conquest wrote about what seemed to have been the divine destiny of this phenomenon. Islamic tradition established this political assertiveness as a basis of the Muslim self-concept.
I call this, Islamic Manifest Destiny. According to this world-view, it is nothing less than the Divine Will that has ensured the success of the Islamic Conquest and the absolutely phenomenal civilization that immediately flowered out of the parched desert sands. Islam is destined by divine right to control Jerusalem. Islamic control is a physical statement of Islam's status. Losing control of such sites is a terrible blow to the Islamic self-concept.
But Islam's association with Jerusalem has a deep spiritual basis as well. According to Islam, Jerusalem is the abode of the prophets, of David and Solomon, where Abraham attempted to sacrifice his son in response to God's command (according to some versions), where John the Baptist, Zakariah, and Jesus lived and ministered. All of these biblical personages are considered prophets in Islam.
Because of the very sanctity of the land, Muhammad himself was miraculously brought there by angels early on in his prophetic career. This is the Night Journey to Jerusalem. From Jerusalem, according to Islamic tradition, Muhammad stepped off the rock, on the Temple Mount, called in Arabic the Holy Sanctuary, and ascended into heaven. It is during this one and only ascent to heaven that Muhammad came face-to-face with God and received all the laws of Islam not found directly in the Qur'an. Thus Jerusalem has become in Islam, just as it is in Judaism and Christianity, the Gateway to Heaven. It also represents, in a way, Mt. Sinai.
Read Qur'an 17:1.
Here we have both a physical connection through the reigns of power, and a spiritual connection associated with the most important personage in human history, according to Islam. Like all the great prophets before him, Muhammad too must be associated with Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and it is through Jerusalem, the gateway to heaven, that Muhammad receives, as it were, the Islamic Torah, or guide to right living and righteous behavior. This has become a supreme event in the sacred history of Islam, and it occurred in Palestine. This great spiritual occasion also has political implications, for Islam never claimed to make the same kind of distinctions between the religious and the secular sphere that are so characteristic of Christian tradition. Islam, like Judaism, has never taught to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render unto God what is God's" (Matthew 22:21).
Despite its sanctity, however, Jerusalem was never the formal destination for the required pilgrimage, or Hajj, in Islam.
Despite the nearly universal political control of Jerusalem by Muslims—aside from a century under the Crusaders—the physical city was often neglected by its rulers. There are a couple of reasons for this.
1. There was an attempt to make sure that Jerusalem would not outshine the more sacred cities of Mecca and Medina. This is associated with the historical reality that some counter-Caliphs tried to establish their authority through the sanctity of Jerusalem.
2. Jerusalem was never a major political center. Damascus, and later, Baghdad, were more natural locations for centers of power because of history, geography, and diplomatic tradition. The places far away from centers of power tend to be neglected, and Jerusalem was not close to centers of Muslim power, especially after the capitol of the Islamic world moved from Damascus to Baghdad in the mid-8th century.
Jerusalem was always revered by its local residents, but not always by Muslims living far away, whose religious compass was directed toward Mecca and Medina, or toward their own local shrines. Nevertheless, because of the non-separation of Mosque and State, it was always expected that Jerusalem be a part of the the Islamic political world.
When the Crusaders first conquered Jerusalem, most Muslims were unhappy about it but not willing to do anything to rectify the situation. Finally, under the leadership of the great Kurdish Muslim warrior, SalŒú al-D¥n [Salah al-Din], a great propaganda campaign was launched that extolled the merits of Jerusalem and Palestine. It was successful in raising Muslims' consciousness about Jerusalem, and resulted in the mustering of armies that eventually reconquered it. Not only did the campaign succeed in bringing Jerusalem back into the World of Islam, it also succeeded in raising its religious and spiritual status.
According to Islamic law, once an area becomes a part of the Islamic world, it must never withdraw or lose Islamic political hegemony. Therefore, the very existence of a Jewish State within what used to be the Islamic world is a serious problem to many Muslims.
In order to gain a realistic understanding, however, we need now to turn briefly to the role of Palestinian nationalism in this complex scenario. Like Zionism, Palestinian Nationalism is also a product of the modern secular Western world. And as we know, the driving ideologies behind Palestinian Nationalism for many years were secular revolutionary ideologies. Palestinians did not want to live under the control and laws of a foreign peoples, just as many modern secularized Jews did not want to live under the control and laws of foreign peoples. Such was the position of the PLO, the PFLP, etc. The Islamization of Palestinian Nationalism occurred only in the past 20-25 years. Note the parallels with Zionism. The religious right among the Palestinians does not support the secular Palestinian Authority. They want to establish Islam as the governing ideology of Palestine (and the rest of the Middle East including Israel).
How did Palestinian Nationalism shift so drastically toward Islamic Palestinian Nationalism over the past 20-25 years? The reasons are somewhat complex, but the summary is simple. None of the nationalist or revolutionary ideologies of Palestinian Nationalism succeeded. Socialism, Communism, pan-Arabism, armed secular revolution, and democracy all failed to carve out a Palestinian state. What is left? What is the fall-back position for an embittered native people? Drop the foreign ideologies and try to build a world out of the rubble of the familiar. After all, when, according to native tradition did the Arab Muslims live in glory and success? Under the rule of the great Muslim empires. What brought these empires their success? The truth and success of Islam. [Note the t-shirt, "Islam is the answer."]
You can easily see how religion and politics are intertwined in the complex relations of Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims to Jerusalem. To whom is Jerusalem more holy? To Jews, Christians, or Muslims? Whose divine association with the land takes precedence over the others? This question can easily degenerate into partisan sloganeering, and name calling, all backed up with the citing of text and reference to powerful symbols, traditions, and history. And this kind of childish name-calling is happening today with a vengeance, especially among many Palestinians who now claim that the ancient Temple so often referred to in the Bible never existed in Jerusalem, that it was entirely fabricated by Jews in order to justify Zionist claims to the Land of Israel.
What is needed today, and what is, unfortunately, sorely lacking, is morally responsible politics that is willing to respect and honor the fears and sacred symbols of one's negotiating partner.
Religion tends to speak in terms of absolutes.
Politics is the art of compromise.
It is only when all of us, Jews Christians and Muslims, will be willing to accept that thousands of years of religious tradition of the other, is deserving of respect—only then will we be in a position to resolve the dispute over Jerusalem.
The Psalmist pleads: Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. May those who love you be at peace. May there be well-being within your ramparts, peace in your citadels.
But I think that Isaiah knew better when he said (1:27): Zion will be redeemed with justice, and its repentant ones, with righteousness.
But justice, in this case, will not be done through religious argument. What is needed today is reasoned discussion and compromise by political leaders, not religious leaders, by political leaders who are courageous enough to insist that power-sharing over Jerusalem is not only possible, it is the only way to resolve the problem of Jerusalem and save the "City of Peace."
Copyright © Reuven Firestone 2002
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