Three of the most widespread religions in the world – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – claim to share one of the most controversial and coveted places in the world – the spot currently occupied by the Muslim Dome of the Rock, formerly (allegedly) occupied by the Temple of Solomon. Because of this controversy (among other reasons), the Israelis and Palestinians have argued over the right to “own” that territory, ever since the creation of the Israeli state. Several theories have arisen as to the reasons why this place is so revered – and so debated. One of these reasons has been the fact that, in the Temple of Solomon, Jews would come and practice kabbalah when they wanted to access magic that went beyond the normal scope of what prayer would supply. There are those who suggest that the reasons behind the very foundation of the Israeli state, and the reasons behind the Palestinian resolve at taking over the part of Jerusalem that contains this holy site – as well as the reasons for American meddling in the Middle East – have to do with a desire to unearth the Temple of Solomon and take advantage of any powerful artifacts that still may be resting there (The Arrivals). The irony that Jerusalem, the “City of Peace,” has so long been a place of conflict, and continues to be a flashpoint for armed violence, is a tragedy – it may the only city in the world where religious feast days require extra squadrons of riot police on hand, as military choppers keep a close view on matters from above. However, those who believe in the power of the Temple of Solomon are just one group among the many that believe this spot to be one of the most sacred on the entire planet.
Since the treaty was signed putting Israel on the map, there have been decades’ worth of military actions and terrorist attacks. The land borders have shifted many times, showing the various conflicts that have raged over the past 64 years (Burgoyne and Richards, p. 112). Just one of the Israeli strategies involved limiting the number of Palestinians who could reside in Jerusalem, to the point that both Palestinian and Israeli human rights observers referred to this as a policy of “deportation” rather than a policy of population control. The loud volume with which both the Israelis claim eternal title to Jerusalem, and Palestine claims a right to al Quds as its capital, means that any peaceful resolution of the situation is highly unlikely. The chaos that these conspiracy theories around the Temple of Solomon have created has led to a mess in the Middle East that is not likely to be unraveled any time soon (The Arrivals).
One of the main problems exacerbating the current situation has been the inclusion of matters of religion in political discussions. As Karen Armstrong notes, “[o]nce religion rears its ugly head, people seem to lose their wits, asserting that the city is so ‘sacred’ that its future is nonnegotiable. It would indeed be desirable to lay aside the vexed question of Jerusalem’s holiness and conduct a rational discussion befitting the modern age, but this is not a realistic option”(6).
An ironic feature of the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been the rekindled growth of religion around the world. At a time when technological capacities are increasing, thus reducing the number of elements of existence that require faith, or supernatural explanation, religion is nonetheless on the rise. In many societies, this growth has taken on the name of “fundamentalism,” which often has little to do with the fundamentals of the religion involved (Rabbat, p. 17). The common purpose of these “fundamentalist” movements has been to dissolve the barriers between religion and politics, rendering them not only equal but interchangeable. Fifty years ago, it seemed like secularization was going to dominate the political scene, and matters of religion would disappear from the public discourse. While some parts of the world have seen more secularization than others, it can be argued that the fundamentalists have won more in the Middle East than anywhere else. Consider the fact that the Six Day War of 1967 erupted as a difference over secular matters – but that, since then, it is the religious differences that have emerged as the most significant. It is the secular groups in Israel and Palestine that have been agitating for peace; it is the religious hard-liners that have kept the battle raging.
As a result of this religious enthusiasm, the significance of the Temple of Solomon, including the beliefs about the artifacts that may, or may not, be lurking below the surface in its ruins, has become a topic of fever pitch. In the early days of Zionism, the religious importance of Jerusalem was a tertiary topic at best; indeed, the purpose of Zionism was to develop a different sort of Jew, one who had transcended a fairly passive (at least in their view) religion (The Arrivals). After all, the purpose of Zionism was basically to sit and wait for Messiah, instead of taking independent action. The still-iconic image of Jews hanging onto the Wailing Wall, lamenting history, was what the Zionists hated. As Theodor Herzl indicated, “the musty deposits of two thousand years of inhumanity, intolerance and foulness” were what repelled him most about the religious zeal of the Jews. Indeed, his idea was to construct a city separate from Jerusalem, dedicated to a secular future, while making an enclosure for the holy shrines of the city. This was what secularism was all about: removing religious enthusiasm from the routine of daily life and relegating it to some sort of museum or structure for the obsolete institution of religion (Herzl, p. 745). Indeed, this was why the Zionists did not object to the establishment of Jerusalem as a special city that had international control. While this opinion would later change, under the initial plan, the Zionists did not think Jerusalem was essential to the Jewish state (Armstrong, p. 7).
It was Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook who began the drumbeat over religious importance for the city in Jerusalem. Even as far back as 1921, he had propagated the notion that a part of the return of Messiah would include the reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple on top of the Dome of the Rock. In the earliest years of Israel’s existence as a separate country, Kook and his adherents were seen as a movement on the edges of sanity. While later politicians would use the last remaining piece of the Temple (the Western Wall, actually part of the Temple of Herod) as a device to gain influence, no such manipulations took place in the country’s early years. Instead, the early political movement in Israel centered on the labor movement, and the most influential Israelis, politically, were not rabbis but instead the leaders of the collective farms, who chose to reside in Tel Aviv (Herzl’s secular city) rather than in Jerusalem. Nahum Sokolov, the Zionist thinker, observed that “[t]he point of gravity has shifted from the Jerusalem of the religious schools to the farms and agricultural schools, the fields and the meadows” (Gilbert, p. 214).
It was the Six Day War of 1967 that changed everything. For the first time in 20 years, Jews had been able to go to the Western Wall; when the city had been partitioned in 1948, this part had been reserved for the Palestinians, and so the Jews could not go there. The conquest changed all of that, and the corresponding emotion would change the nature of discourse about the Israeli state forever. It was that emotion that inspired politicians to talk about the “holy” places in Jerusalem and pledge their ongoing fealty to protecting them. Within weeks, the Israeli government had overridden the international convention that Jerusalem was under international control, instead annexing the city to the country’s territory. For the first time, such holy places at the Dome of the Rock (and the Temple beneath it) took on a central role in the Zionist vision (Armstrong, p. 8). The ideas of Rabbi Kook, and his son, returned to the forefront of the debates around Jerusalem, fomenting a movement that was all about keeping the holy spaces in Jerusalem sacred. The appearance of these ideas in the mainstream meant that such groups as the Gush Emunium (Bloc of the Faithful), who wanted to set up illegal settlements in the Israeli-occupied territories, so that the Messiah would return sooner and the world’s redemption would happen more quickly (Mendenhall, p. 32). Believers in this group decry the secularism of the other wings of Israeli thought as having lost the moral leaven of true Judaism. Of course, these “true” believers in Judaism have proven to be no more moral than their enemies; in 1984, the Gush Emunium was connected to a plot to destroy the Dome of the Rock (Armstrong, p. 8).
The idea that Rabbi Kook and his followers had to rebuild the Temple of Solomon had been a forbidden concept for Jews to consider for centuries before 1921. The Zealots, a party in Jerusalem active around the time of the birth of Jesus, were actively pushing for the rebuilding of the structure, and it was their agitation that caused a war between the Palestinian Jews and the Roman Empire in 66 CE; four years later, the remnants of the Temple (and the rest of the city) would be leveled (Pritchard, p. 18). A similar agitation caused the Bar Kochba revolt, which ended in 135 CE, with the Romans destroying 985 villages as well as almost 600,000 Jewish soldiers – and possibly as many Jewish civilians (Armstrong, pg. 8). This devastation led the rabbis of the day to dismiss the dream of rebuilding the Temple, even going so far as to proscribe the people from agitating about it. At that time, rabbinical scholars decided that rebuilding the Temple would be the function of Messiah, not the people, and the idea of rebuilding the Temple with human hands was deemed sacrilegious. That has not stopped the Jewish establishment, in modern times, from forming the Temple Institute, which has set up a permanent display in the Old City that shows the vessels, musical instruments and rabbinical garments that will go into the new Temple for use.
The burning question, then, behind the conspiracy theory about the Temple of Solomon, is to figure out why the sacred is so important. Why will people throw away caution and logic in order to cling to relics such as the Temple, or some kabbalah-related objects that might be inside? The Jews are not the only religious people in history that have placed such emphasis on location; consider the example of Christianity. In the New Testament, Jesus says that, while God and several prophets had appeared in several places on the earth, in the future, believers would no longer run into the divine in special places; instead, believers could access God anywhere, as long as they were in attitude of “spirit and truth” (John 4:19-24). However, once the tomb that had once held Jesus was discovered, pilgrims came from as far as France, on foot, to see it. Ironically, the tomb of Jesus was beneath a later temple (the Temple of Aphrodite), just as the Temple of Solomon is now under a site built for a different religion. Jerusalem changed from an outpost to the focal city of the Christian world.
Both the example of the empty tomb and the example of the Temple of Solomon are instructive about the way that people feel about sites that are sacred to them. Both situations involved peoples who had intellectually accepted the idea that specific objects and places were not necessarily important. Then, both access to the Western Wall and the discovery of an empty tomb galvanized many of the followers of both religions, as answers to questions that had roiled for years were now accessible. Both Christians and Jews had, at that time, endured persecution (the Christians, at the time of the tomb’s discovery, had only recently won freedom from Rome’s ban, thanks to Constantine), and both groups had also received a significant boost into power. The Christians had won status as an official religion under the emperor Constantine, and the Jews had just been given, at long last, a sovereign state of their own in the land of Israel. For the Christians, finding the temple was similar to Jesus himself returning from the grave; the tomb showed the world, once again, that Jesus truly had risen from the grave. As Eusebius, Constantine’s religious consultant had put it, finding the tomb of Jesus under the Temple of Aphrodite “symbolized the Christians’ own recent resurgence and imminent victory over paganism” (Eusebius, 3.28). The empty tomb became the Christians’ new icon of identity, just as the Western Wall would much later become the new icon for the Jews who wanted to reclaim all of that area as a sacred plot. The Western Wall had survived millennia, just like the Jewish people, who had survived pogrom after wipeout after massacre, culminating in Hitler’s attempt to eliminate every one of them (Ben Dov, p. 73).
This instinct manifested itself at the end of the Six Day War of 1967. The 619 people who lived in the Maghribi Quarter, near the Western Wall, had a total of three hours to move out of their homes (Rabbat, p. 14). At the end of those three hours, a series of bulldozers came and leveled this housing district, one of the city’s earliest, to a pile of trash, as part of “urban renewal” (Armstrong, p. 10). Over the next few months, Arab Jerusalem was taken apart, piece by piece.
If one considers human nature, there should be no surprise that, for many, there is a sacred attachment to the Temple of Solomon and the objects that might be in there, capable of providing some sort of supernatural power. After all, a visit to one’s holy places is not just an encounter with one’s deity; it is also an encounter with parts of oneself that one may not have considered in a long time. Religious belief is never wholly external, as the decision to place faith in something besides oneself requires the investment of a part of oneself in that belief. Having a sacred place, such as the empty tomb, or a shrine where the Virgin Mary appears, or a hidden Temple underground, appears to fulfill a need that people have. Building shrines and making special places where religious observance can take place is, after all, one of the earliest human responses, as religion is far holder than recorded history. Having a centering place gives many people an object or site on the planet that provides meaning. Facing east to pray may be a trait of the Muslim religion, but having a place where one can worship on a regular basis is important to adherents of just about every religion.
Even the totally secular have not been able to drive the mystique of the sacred place out of themselves. Even those who acknowledge no particular set of religious beliefs have, by and large, places in mind that have especial associations. Many times, these places have a connection with a loved family member, or an event that happened to us that we will always remember. These places provide a sense of identity and wholeness, and it is for this reason that just about all of the world’s religions have places that are considered sacred; Jerusalem just happens to be a place where this association overlaps for three different religions.
When considering the importance of the objects that may lie beneath the Dome of the Rock, or the importance of other sacred places and relics, it is important to reconsider the possible meanings of the word “holy.” If religion is all about creating a happy feeling by visiting particular places, then it is not a religion; instead, the instinct is tourism (Adler, p. 8). For the impulse to be truly religious, there must be some sort of ethical or moral dimension. All three of the religions that are arguing over Jerusalem assert that true faith appears in compassion and mercy – two impulses that may well be the exact opposite of the desire to conquer a specific piece of land and turn it into a shrine for what one believes. Because all three of these religions have historically emphasized the fact that love and dignity for one’s neighbor are of paramount importance. When people lose sight of those two virtues (love and dignity) and instead focus on rights, on property, on ownership, on exclusion, then their moral right to anything begins to wane, as they are forfeiting it through a devotion to the material. Whatever lurks beneath the Dome on the Rock is not nearly as important as the way that those people who are curious about it behave toward one another.
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