Three Faiths Of Jerusalem One God In Three Religions—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Whose Stories And Doctrines Overlap, As Do Their Holy Places In This Trafffic Jam Of Holy Histories
In roughly 996 B.C.E. (Before the Common Era), a guerrilla fighter named David captured the city of Jerusalem from the Jebusites. He wished to make a clean start here, making the city the capital of all 12 united tribes of Israel.
He even tried to change the city’s name (Jerusalem means Place of Shalem, the Jebusite god), but other religions came to stay in this place, and “Jerusalem” outlasted the new name, the City of David.
To commemorate the 3,000th anniversary of David’s capture of Jerusalem, the prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, last September formally opened the celebration called Jerusalem 3000.
Rabin, a tough veteran of Israel’s Six Day War in 1967, was a fitting successor to David. Rabin could not open the festivities at the point where David entered the Jebusite city. That part of Jerusalem is now inhabited by Arabs, and an informal agreement keeps Jews from going there because their presence might cause trouble. So Rabin was a warrior who could also wage peace.
It was as a hero of peace that he was struck down in Tel Aviv three months after formally opening the Jerusalem 3000 celebration. It was not an Arab who killed him, but a right-wing Jew unhappy that he would make peace with Arabs.
Post-Jebusite Jerusalem is a city of contending monotheisms. In a kind of parody of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity (three persons in one God), Jerusalem offers us the spectacle of one God in three religions - Jewish, Christian, Muslim. Their stories and doctrines overlap - as do their holy places - in this traffic jam of holy histories.
The assassination of Rabin by one of his co-religionists shows that the deepest causes of conflict in Jerusalem are not so much between different faiths as inside those faiths - different visions of God’s imperative intrusion into history, stamping an indelible presence on the city’s tenaciously remembering rocks.
Nothing disappears entirely from Jerusalem’s hard profile of flinty resistance. The very stones of Jerusalem have entered the world’s religious language.
God is a rock to the Psalmist. So is Abraham a rock to his people. Jesus is called a rock in the New Testament, and Peter is the rock on which his church is built.
Muslims revere on their mount a rock that is the center of the Earth, the natural place for Mohammed to leave Earth for heaven. Jesus ascended to heaven from a height across from the city, on the Mount of Olives, where Jewish prophecy said the Lord would stand at the end of time (Zechariah 14:4).
These sacred places of God lay beneath all conflicts of ritual or customs as pilgrims of the three faiths came to this place over the centuries.
The planners of Jerusalem 3000 have scheduled a rich menu of cultural events, including dance, opera and drama. But the sacred sites themselves matter most to visitors. Muslims make pilgrimages here, and Christian visitors outnumber Jewish ones. And visitors should not restrict themselves to their own traditional shrines. It would be a blind Christian who could ignore the stunning beauty of the Muslim Dome of the Rock, which occupies, roughly, the site of Solomon’s temple.
Jesus imagined the stones of Jerusalem “crying out.” They still do, for all three faiths.
THE JEWISH STONES
Jerusalem has many places sacred to Jews - the traditional Tomb of David, historic synagogues or their ruins (the Hurva, with its symbolic arch) - but the center of religious memory is the western wall of the temple platform.
The huge stones of this structure, with refined borders cut along their edges, were part of an engineering miracle. Herod, the Jewish king under Roman rule, built a vast level place over the eastern ridge’s jagged outline. He raised part of this temple platform on hidden arches, which became known as “Solomon’s Stables.”
When the temple built here was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E. (Common Era), and Jews were expelled from Jerusalem, they yearned back toward the site of the temple and went, on their return, to the western wall of the platform, the part of the wall closest to the temple’s lost “Holy of Holies.”
Consecrated by centuries of worship, this has become the scene of daily prayer. Messages are tucked into tight crannies where the unmortised stones clutch each other.
The place really comes alive on Shabbat or other holy days. The Shofar (goat horn) is blown. Ringleted boys wearing adult black fedoras back out of the entryway to the wall, showing respect as they depart. At bar mitzvahs, female relatives crowd the barrier to the men’s section and throw candies across it. The site is no longer officially called the Wailing Wall, but high, keening cries are often raised by devout elders.
The base of the temple platform exists on all four sides of the huge space created by Herod. In the 1960s, excavations at the south wall, just around the corner from what used to be called the Wailing Wall, turned up wide steps descending from the wall’s double gate.
Farther along the south wall, a triple gate has some of the original Herodian molding cut in stone for the left door jamb. Below the stair level are ancient ritual baths (mikvahs) for those purifying themselves before entering the temple.
At the corner of the south and west walls, the remains of shops were perhaps the very ones Jesus attacked for making temple profits from the sale of small animals for sacrifices.
This excavation is typical in that it turned up things important to all the region’s believers. The mikvahs and temple remains are an important part of Jewish history. The steps are the only part of Jerusalem that historians feel sure were touched by Jesus. And the decorative lintels added to the old gates are - like the arches of the Golden Gate itself - Muslim work. Yet this stunning area is still little visited by tourists. The 3000 celebration is making its access more attractive and better marked.
THE CHRISTIAN STONES
In the 4th century, the Christian emperor Constantine built a huge classical church over the site of Jesus’ death and burial. That church was destroyed several times by Muslims, who hacked away the rock surfaces of Golgoth and the tomb with pickaxes.
The remains of Constantine’s circular colonnade were restored at half their original height by a Byzantine emperor in 1009, and the Crusaders built a Romanesque church - the Church of the Holy Sepulchre - over the old court area. The nave of Constantine’s church is lost in a cluster of later buildings.
Today, pilgrims enter this 11th-century rotunda by a side door through Crusader (13th century) portals. Inside, there is a cramped little structure over the tomb site. One must stand in line, in the dark church, to duck under a low lintel guarded by one of the Christian sects who protect it. On the day we went there, they were Armenians.
While I was inside (the place holds only three or four at a time), there was a great shouting in the crowd that continuously mills around outside. When I came out, I learned that a known pickpocket had been spotted and was pursued with shouts of “Steals money!” It is not what one expects inside a Western church, but holiness and everyday drama go hand-in-hand here.
Muslim boys now go to school in a building formed of the ruins of The Antonia, a fortress connected to the temple platform, where it used to be thought Jesus was tried. The medieval Way of the Cross wound its way from that site to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It now passes through the Muslim Quarter, where merchants in white burnooses sell rosary beads, pictures of Jesus whose eyes open as you shift your angle of approach, rich rugs, racy T-shirts, exotic food and soft drinks.
Historians and archeologists now hold that Jesus was tried in a place much closer to the Sepulchre, the towers of Herod’s palace now incorporated into the Citadel at Joffa Gate. This rugged set of ruins provides a good view of the city from its top. Inside the highest tower an animated movie is coordinated with exhibits that present a rapid but thorough review of the city’s complex history. The courtyard is a pleasant spot to have a cold soft drink and snack, where rough walls surround you and excavated layers of the past lie at your feet.
THE MUSLIM STONES
Jews and Christians worship at ruined shrines, but the Muslim Dome of the Rock has not been structurally altered, except with minor replacements and repairs, since it was built in 691-692 C.E. by Abd-al-Malik. It has benefited from Jewish and Christian protection.
The Jewish contribution was Herod’s great platform, earthquake-proof in its central portions. The Christian Crusaders kept the Dome of the Rock as a church dedicated to Solomon. (Muslims had done a similar favor to the Sixth-century Christian church at Bethlehem, which they preserved as a mosque.)
The dome is the most beautiful building in Jerusalem - one of the most beautiful in the world - and with its gold-plated dome, it dominates the city’s skyline. Built to the airy, abstract patterns of geometry, it represents the kind of church Renaissance architects in the West would not be capable of for five more centuries.
The temple is an octagon containing a square containing a circle. The building’s height at the peak of the dome is the same as its width. The rough stone from which Mohammed ascended to heaven is in the center of this smooth intellectual achievement.
The abstract quality of the structure is not cold because rich decorative tiles cover the outer surfaces, as do mosaics on inner surfaces. Muslim doctrine prohibits the portrayal of animate figures, but Arabic calligraphy is itself a form of decoration, reminding us that this is a religion of the word, of the book.
Respect for learning made the dome’s builders consider illiterate Western Christians of the Dark Ages a barbaric people, people who could “read” their doctrines only in pictures and statues.
At the south end of the same Herodian platform that holds the dome is the El Aqsa mosque, built in 715 C.E. Crusaders used this building as headquarters for the Templars, a religious-military order. But the end of the platform stands over the arches of Solomon’s Stables, not over solid fill, so earthquakes have caused extensive harm and rebuilding. The massed ranks of prayer rugs inside remind us why Pope John Paul II praised Muslims for their devout prayer life.
Tourists get daily reminders of that prayer life if they have not used their tickets to the dome, the mosque or the Islamic Museum by 11 a.m. or 2 p.m. That is when all non-Muslims are swept off the platform for the prayer hours. (Taxis are hard to get at that time, too, because many of the drivers are Muslim.)
We had a long way to go one morning to get off the platform, since we had been at the northern end where boys from the school built over the Antonia’s wall were playing soccer in the dust of this large shrine. Soccer binds together the children of all the sects of this town. Christian boys were playing it as I passed their La Salle School while walking the ramparts; Jewish boys play it at their school by the Tomb of David.
Despite their religious differences, all the people of Jerusalem share a common love of children - along with their devotion to David and to the God of Abraham. Yitzhak Rabin died trying to remind others of their common stake in peace.
Actor Richard Dreyfuss, at a memorial service in New York, said Rabin was a great warrior, but that he never showed more courage than in his last years working for reconciliation. The support for a peace settlement rose sharply after his death. Is it too much to hope that his legacy is what will mark the celebration he inaugurated when he opened Jerusalem 3000?
MEMO: For general information about travel in Israel and Jerusalem, and for details on Jerusalem 3000, contact the Israel Government Tourist Office, 350 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10118; (212) 499-5600.