Entirely and absolutely empty
Recent shifts in policy in Israel regarding the rock and architectural features that are special places for Jews and Muslims have elicited the usual hackneyed description that too many journalists fall back on: holy. The wall at the bottom and the building at the top are claimed to have an elevation of status from the surrounding territory, which itself supposedly has its own elevated status above country that aren’t called the Holy Land.
Must we accept this designation? That depends on what is meant by the word. It comes from Germanic roots that meant whole or healthy. When the weapon-wielding barbarians were converted by meddlesome Mediterraneans, they used their native word to translate the Latin sanctus, a word that was more religious than medical in its usage.
Calling any part of the Middle East whole or healthy strains language beyond its proper capabilities. In what way, then, are the Western Wall, the Dome of the Rock, and other sites holy?
Obviously, they are reveared by believers in various flavors of western monotheism as places where important events in their religious tradition were supposed to have occurred.
Human beings do like to visit the locations that hosted memorable activity. For example, I have stood in the spot where the first nuclear device exploded, the Trinity site in New Mexico. It is still mildly radioactive, with a stub of the tower that held the gadget remaining and a collection of trinitite, the green glass produced by the heat energy out of the sands of the desert floor, put on display. I didn’t have a worshipful attitude, though I could understand why someone would come to that word on first thought, but awe is an appropriate reaction there — awful wonder for the power that is possible in the universe and that we human beings have learned to control in some measure, awe in the fearful sense for what we regarded ourselves as having any business exploiting.
Given the nature of nuclear fission and fusion, the Trinity site can reasonably ask for respect from all human beings. The place where we proved our ability to power our civilization or to end it is deserving of universal memory. And anyone who wants evidence of the event in question can go verify its historicity — well, on the day that the military allows people to go there, that is.
In the case of sites in the region of Jerusalem, things are not so clear. There are many believers, but not so much evidence. That’s especially the case since archaeological investigation of the location get stymied by the politics of the area. Unlike events that are accepted as historical, however, the stories associated with this spot have power as mythology, as stories that are taken to be definitive and explanatory in a person’s life — though the believers often insist that the events described were indeed historical.
But do I have to call those places holy? In a free society, reverence is voluntary, even when it’s warranted. Near the end of the film, Kingdom of Heaven, Balian, the crusader guardian of Jerusalem, threatens to burn the city, destroying the monuments of all the religions, rather than surrender to Saladin. The Sultan replies that he wonders if that wouldn’t be a good choice, to destroy the focus of what has now been millennia of contention.
I’d like to think that we’ve moved past the need to erase the past to save ourselves from its consequences, though the Middle East and the Balkans and Ireland are only some of the many possible examples showing that we are still vulnerable to elderly resentments.
It’s safer to revere Hogwarts or Minas Tirith, given that they are places of the imagination, but if we are to preserve Jerusalem and other places like it, we may have to declare them to be the possessions of all humanity, administered and protected by something like the United Nations, open to all and exclusive to none. But the way things go, humanity is likely to suffer many more years of fighting that will exhaust believers, ultimately making the wall and dome and the rest mere curiosities, stripped of meaning by people who will be too weary to care anymore.
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