CLAL Special Features
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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.”
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