The Destruction of Jerusalem
In chapter five of “Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths,” Armstrong explains that the destruction of Jerusalem left the people hopeless and without a place to worship. When the Babylonian troops stormed the city and left it in rubble, the people of Judah felt their only hope was lost. Armstrong depicts the way that the people felt at the moment in which the Babylonians entered the temple courts. She states that “they longed for vengeance and dreamed of smashing the heads of Babylonian babies against a rock.” (Armstrong 98) While the people of Jerusalem were not known for their outward violence, this depicts the level of grief and anger they felt toward their captors. Armstrong further explains that the people of Jerusalem became a laughing stock. People were saying, “Where is their god?” (Armstrong 98) The people of Judah had been devastated because there was no chance of contacting the holy realm in the ancient world without a temple or place of worship.
This feeling of losing your place of worship is one that I am personally familiar with. When I was in elementary school, my church was sent nail bombs, which destroyed our church. We were left without a place of worship and felt unsafe. We had felt as if there was no place to turn for worship.
When looking at these two separate occasions, the destruction of Jerusalem and the destruction of my church, there are some blatant similarities. While on two completely different levels of loss, they share the same fundamental feeling of losing something extremely important. One text I have read recently that helped me understand and overcome my lingering feelings was “The Sacred and Profane” by Mircea Eliade. In the text, he explains how a place of worship does not necessarily need an ornate or lavish building to be an anchor point for contacting the holy. In religion, you can seemingly make anything hold religious value. If you want your home to be your church, believe it is yours.
The people of Jerusalem, no matter how beaten and battered they were, always had their God following them. To them, losing their temple was the end. They believed they could not contact God as it was their axis mundi. However, their prayers were what drew God to them.
Citation:
Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths by Karen Armstrong
Nice post comparing the loss of Jerusalem in the 6th century BCE to your loss of sacred space in the recent past. Like you suggest, I think Eliade does a nice job of showing how religious people have both attached extreme importance to specific sacred space (to the pointing of feeling completely lost when it is gone), but also the ability to adapt and rethink their understanding of the divine presence when they do lose their sacred space. Of course, adapting doesn't also mean that people necessarily lose their attachment to the sacred space. That connection is strong and can last generations after the space is gone.
ReplyDelete