No such thing as holy ground

By Scott Korb
author, historian

One can hardly keep up. First it's violent clashes in Hebron following Israel's decision to include Rachel's Tomb (a.k.a. the Bilal ibn Rabah mosque) and the Cave of the Patriarchs (a.k.a. the al-Ibrahimi mosque) on a list of national heritage sites. Then, with the dedication of a public square in the West Bank town of Ramallah, a group of young Palestinians honor as a martyr Dalal Mughrabi, who in 1978 took part in a terrorist attack on the coastal highway that killed 38 Israelis. East Jerusalem is increasingly a mess, as Palestinian families are evicted by Israeli courts and replaced by settlers with claims to an ancestral home. Plans are in the works for 1,600 additional housing units in the neighborhood. Palestinians disrupt Friday prayer. Israeli police keep Muslim men under the age of 50 from praying in the Noble Sanctuary (a.k.a. the Temple Mount). The West Bank is sealed off for a few days.

It's often said that this particular conflict over land - or is it more accurate to say mere space in the magnetic mess of Jerusalem? - is political and has nothing to do with religion. And though I am sympathetic to the idea that there is nothing inherent to Islam or Judaism (or, indeed, my own Christianity) that suggests the violent hatred we see in this part of the world, I cannot help but see this problem in religious terms: In terms of a battle over God's creation.

Admittedly, my own experience in the Holy Land is limited. But what I've seen there and what I read about today from the safety of New York suggests that our shared history and, indeed, our great (often shared) mythologies, have taught us very little about the place of God in the world - by which I mean that God actually has no place in the world.

Historically, too many people have believed that God literally resides on earth. Our believing this has made God's places of residence not only sacred pilgrimage or "heritage" sites, but also evidence of God's commitment to us. Likewise, our own unyielding defense of those places has been seen as evidence of our commitment to God. That is, if the Temple's Holy of Holies was truly where God lived until its destruction by the Romans in 70 CE, what's left of it is ours to defend, until the end of time.

Or, if Jesus was born in Bethlehem, died on Calvary and rolled back the stone of his tomb, those places, in and of themselves, become the residences of God, and so ours to reside in and ours to protect. Indeed, over the centuries, various Christian churches have divided up control - and so, protection, a.k.a. sweeping - of Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which contains the sites of Jesus' death, anointing, burial, and Easter resurrection. And yet, what this church should remind Christians is that when God died, he actually disappeared, leaving the earth just as he found it, long before this church existed.

What Jesus changed were hearts and minds and spirits, something God has done in all religious traditions. The supposedly sacred places where these changes took place ought to matter today far less than they do.

Seeing the world this way might not, in fact, be such a difficult task. If you listen carefully to the voices coming out of Jerusalem today, it sounds like it's already happening. What might dishearten us - beyond the endless violence and death - is that arguments about the settlements in East Jerusalem sound no different than the arguments over the national heritage sites. Apartment units thrown up by Israeli developers have become as sacred as Rachel's tomb built by stone by stone by Abraham himself. Or, to look at it another way, Rachel's ancient and now fortified burial place is no more sacred than an apartment complex.

Now, I don't think this is necessarily wrong. And indeed, if we can stop imagining the places where God has lived (and died) as somehow vulnerable, then perhaps we can open up to the moral bravery it takes, in the words of James Agee - a particular hero of mine - to make "an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity."

The violence and death so dishearten me because God's people, regardless of tradition, should matter more than we can imagine - human divinity, God's creation in God's image. And if you're someone who takes comfort in calling the world "God's creation," think carefully for a moment about not just whose world you're fighting over, but, more importantly, whose world you're fighting on.

Scott Korb is co-author, with Peter Bebergal, of "The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God" (Bloomsbury, 2007) and associate editor of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (UNC Press, 2008), winner of the American Historical Association's 2009 J. Franklin Jameson Prize. His latest book is "Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine" (Riverhead, 2010). He currently teaches religion and food writing at the New School and New York University.

By Scott Korb |  March 18, 2010; 12:34 PM ET Save & Share:                 
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