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By Kenneth L. Woodward
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One man, Jesus warned, cannot serve two masters. Yet Jerusalem is sacred stone and soil to Jew and Christian and Muslim alike. A place on the map like any other city, Jerusalem exists more vividly, more powerfully, more dangerously within the longitude and latitude of the religious imagination. In that fertile region of the mind, what has already occurred in time past--the building of Solomon's temple, the crucifixion of Christ, the ascension of the Prophet Muhammad--is also promise of what is to come, "when time shall be no more." Among all the cities of the earth, only Jerusalem is seen as the locus of redemption and final judgment. For that reason alone, it inspires the fanatic. It is a burden no merely civil administration should ever have to bear. But short of that eschatological moment, Jerusalem seems to be always searching for respite from political tension, that it might live up to the meaning of its name: City of Peace.
To know what Jerusalem means to the three great monotheisms is to realize that politics alone can bring only a provisional kind of peace. Jews have the oldest identification with the city--and the Bible, which mentions Jerusalem 667 times, for their witness. In the background is God's promise of land and progeny to Abraham, His obedient servant. In the Book of Exodus, that promise takes the specific form of Canaan--the Holy Land--for the wandering tribes of Israel. King David made Jerusalem his capital and there, some 30 centuries ago, Solomon built the first temple. The exile of the Jews to Babylon only made the yearning for Jerusalem more intense. "If I forget you, O Jerusalem," wrote the Psalmist, "let my right hand wither." A second temple was built by King Herod, only to be destroyed in A.D. 70 by the Romans. What remains of the Western wall is now Judaism's holiest shrine. Jerusalem, wrote Abraham Joshua Heschel right after the Israeli occupation of the city in 1967, is "a city of witness, an echo of eternity." It is also a city of waiting, the place where the messiah, when he comes, will rebuild the temple. To die in Jerusalem, pious Jews believe, is to be assured of atonement.
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For Christians, the messiah has already come and atonement has been accomplished in the person of Jesus. Jerusalem is where he suffered, died and rose again in glory--and where he will return to judge the living and the dead. It is also the city where the Last Supper was celebrated and where, at Pentecost, the church itself was born. As a place of Christian pilgrimage, Jerusalem has no equal. Medieval maps place it at the center of the universe (as did Dante), and paintings show medieval Jerusalem descending as the heavenly city to come. Today pilgrims can touch the rock where Jesus was crucified and, under the same church roof, the tomb where he was buried. The cross is gone, but in the Christian iconography, it continues to be the axis mundi connecting earth with heaven in the sacred drama of redemption.
For Muslims, Jerusalem is the third holiest place, after Mecca and Medina. To Muhammad, it was the city of the holy prophets who had preceded him. And so, before Mecca became the center of the Islamic universe, Muhammad directed all Muslims to bow for prayer toward Jerusalem. According to later interpretations of a passage in the Qur'an, Muhammad himself made a mystical "night flight" to Jerusalem aided by the angel Gabriel. From there, on the very rock where Abraham had offered his son as a sacrifice (now the shrine of the Dome of the Rock, atop the Temple Mount), Muhammad ascended a ladder to the throne of Allah. This ascension confirmed the continuity between Muhammad and all previous prophets and messengers of God, including Jesus, in a lineage going back to Adam. It also established a divine connection between Mecca and Jerusalem.
Thus, for billions of believers who may never see it, Jerusalem remains a city central to their sacred geography. This is why the future of the city is not just another Middle Eastern conflict between Arabs and Jews. From a purely secular perspective, of course, the shrines dear to Jews, Christians and Muslims are precious tourist attractions, and as such important sources of revenue. But Jerusalem is not some kind of Disneyland of the spirit. Both Israel and the Palestinians have real roots in the Holy Land, and both want to claim Jerusalem as their capital. The United Nations, supported by the Vatican, would have the city internationalized and under its jurisdiction. The issue, however, is not merely one of geopolitics. There will be no enduring solution to the question of Jerusalem that does not respect the attachments to the city formed by each faith. Whoever controls Jerusalem will always be constrained by the meaning the city has acquired over three millenniums of wars, conquest and prophetic utterance. Blessed or cursed, Jerusalem is built with the bricks of the religious imagination. Were this not so, Jerusalem would be what it has never been: just another city on a hill.
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