Jerusalem is a festival and a lamentation. Its song is a sigh
across the ages, a delicate, robust, mournful psalm at the great
junction of spiritual cultures. Here among the constant ruins and
rebuilding of civilizations lies the coexistence of diversity and
intolerance.
In Jerusalem, the moment of harmony comes at dawn. The first light
sings a pastel tune on ancient stone. As the sun rises from behind
the desert mountains across the Jordan and the Dead Sea, the rays
touch the curve of the Mount of Olives, then illuminate the
creations of man. The sunlight kindles the brilliant gold of the
Dome of the Rock, built by Muslims around the massive stone from
which the faithful believe Mohammad departed on his night journey
to heaven. Then the adjacent al-Aqsa Mosque is lit, followed by the
newest blocks of towering stone yeshivas in the Jewish Quarter of
the Old City, reconstructed by the Israelis as testimony to the
revival of the Jewish state and to the holiness of Jerusalem to the
Jews. The light catches the dome and eclectic superstructure of the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built over the centuries by Christian
denominations on the site determined by the mother of Constantine,
Queen Helena, to have been the place of the crucifixion, the
burial, and the resurrection of Jesus.
The new sun casts a rose glow on the saw-toothed top of the wall
that encloses the Old City. Practically every ruler of Jerusalem
has added to the city wall, changing its configuration, building on
the levels of earlier epochs. And as the sun climbs, the
illumination descends along the courses of stone, working its way
back through time, lighting first the repairs made by the Israelis,
as the city's latest conquerors, to the uppermost ramparts erected
by the Turkish sultans of the Ottoman Empire. Then teasing color
out of the layers placed by the Byzantines, the Crusaders, King
Herod, and finally, at the southeast corner, blocks that may have
been laid during the time of Nehemiah, following the exile of the
Jews in Babylon.
Within the walls, light slowly penetrates the narrow alleys and
secluded courtyards where small communities of Jews, Muslims,
Armenians, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and other ethnic and
religious groups reside with intense devotion to their traditions
and their faiths. Below al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, the
freshening day softens the shadow thrown by the massive blocks of
Herodian stone that make up the revered Wailing Wall or Western
Wall, which is the western retaining wall of the Temple Mount, or
Mount Moriah, the plateau on which the Muslim shrines now stand,
where the Temple of Solomon once stood, and where no Jewish place
of worship has existed since the Second Temple was burned by the
Romans in A.D. 70.
In most cities of the world, the first to wake are the servants and
workers and merchants - the bus drivers, the garbagemen, the cooks,
the calloused men and women who bear their produce to early morning
market. But in Jerusalem it is the pious who greet the dawn - the
Muslims, Jews and Christians who sacrifice sleep for prayer. Their
calls and chants in the eerie half-light of the Old City mingle in
an overlapping minor key like separate strains of the same
plaintive melody.
Like the Dead Sea, saturated with rich and poisonous salts and
minerals, this small quarter of Jerusalem holds a concentration of
congested traditions and convictions of beauty and rage.
[…] The name of Jerusalem in Hebrew is Yerushalayim - "City
of Peace." In Arabic it is al-Quds - "The Holy." Since its first
appearance in manuscripts as a Canaanite city-state in the Bronze
Age nearly 4,000 years ago - and all through a succession of
conquerors and rulers - Jerusalem has known no line between warfare
and religion. It is a center of conflicting absolutes, of
certainty, of righteousness. Its lofty refinement of intellect and
theology has given enlightenment to its violence, mixing the wisdom
of the ages into eternal bloodshed.
Jerusalem is located on a ridge of rolling hills that have
historically divided two fundamentals of human society - the desert
and the farm, the nomadic encampment and the sedentary village, the
land of milk and the land of honey. On the east, the land runs down
into the stark, dry Judean Desert and its milk-producing herds of
goats tended by semi-nomadic tribesmen. On the west, the hills
descend onto the coastal plain along the Mediterranean, with the
sweet orchards and lush fields of the settled villagers. The land
of milk and honey is thus two lands, merging and grinding at one
another, shaping the nature of Jerusalem, which stands between the
fertile and the arid, the rooted and the wandered. And Jerusalem in
turn has zealously nurtured both the worldly and the parochial, the
scholar and the bigot. The thick walls surrounding the Old City
keep nothing out and nothing in, but bear witness to the flow of
faiths and hatreds through the great gates.