CLAL Special Features

Welcome to CLAL Special Features where you will find articles by guest columnists and roundtables on hot issues and special topics.


Jewish Public Forum Seminar: “What Is Religion For?”
November 19, 2001 

Pre-Seminar Response to the Question:

“What Is Religion For?”

By Steve Greenberg 

The problem of religious arrogance has haunted me since the events of the September 11.  We all came face to face with the moral and mortal danger of “God’s chosen ones” carrying out the punishment of an evil empire in a terrible Islamic fundamentalist drama.  Once heaven’s spotlight shines exclusively upon a single religion, the rest are easily cast as supporting players, walk-ons or, as we have seen only too graphically, as antagonists. 

No faith can claim to be the exclusive path to the divine and avoid being implicated in the violence done in the name of God.  Those who believe that that their religious story is ultimately the only story, who claim that one cannot reach God except through Moses or Jesus or Mohammed have become a threat, not only to the plausibility of any religious world vision, but the very safety of the world.  The rising threat of Islamic fundamentalism challenges us all to find within each of our faiths, the capacity to speak a private religious language that we do not force upon others and a public religious language that struggles to include everyone. 

Given this, I have begun to think that, despite the fact that I had at one time longed for the Jewish recapture of the Temple Mount, I no longer need or want to mark the most sacred place for Jews as “only ours.”   It should be our honor that the sacred rock of the Temple Mount be for deemed holy for members of every monotheistic faith.   Surely each faith needs its own sacred space.  Retaining the plaza of the Western Wall as a Jewish pilgrimage and prayer space and keeping Al-Aksa open for Moslems on the southern side of the Temple Mount would seem right.  But each faith needs in very palpable and clear ways to give away its grasping ownership of the unknowable God. The central Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock standing roughly in the same place as the destroyed ancient Jewish Temples of Herod and Solomon, should be open for contemplation and prayer to the One God.    An admission that at the very center of our faith is a mystery that empties us of our  certainties and binds us to God in wonder.  Of course, this is hardly a new thought.  Isaiah said it long ago in a vision of the future Temple that, he says in the name of God, would be a “house of prayer for all peoples.”  

 


    

To join the conversation at Special Features Discussion, click here.
To access the Special Features Archive, click here.
To receive  CLAL Special Features column by email on a regular basis, complete the box below:
topica
 Receive CLAL Special Features! 
       



Copyright c. 2001, CLAL - The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.