|
Photograph by Hallie Cohen |
The spectacle of Jerusalem on the Sabbath can at first
remind you of any crowded ethnically populated urban center. You could be
in the Bronx or especially Brooklyn, seeing Orthodox Jews in their Streimels
rushing home to synagogue before sundown. All that’s missing is the
rumble of the elevated trains. In its place you hear the calls of three of the
world’s great religions for whom Jerusalem is a sacred site. As you head
towards the
Wailing Wall, the golden
Dome of the Rock appears like a setting
sun
above the rooftops. The Muslim call
to prayer and chiming bells from a nearby church create their own antiphonal score and every morning at 5:30 you can attend the ritual by which the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre is opened with a super large key. We often look at prayer as a solitary activity. Certainly meditation is
predicated on the notion of individuality even as much as it may allow us to
transcend our own immediate concerns. Yet there is another notion of prayer
based on the idea of strength in numbers. In Israel there are many uniforms that identify the varying collectivities of spiritual experience, from the hijabs worn by Muslim women to the white and black of the Druze and yes there are some who would say that the young men and women in IDF uniforms roaming through the crowds with their machine guns also represent a spiritual order or at the very least an attempt at keeping spiritual order. The Hasids and other Orthodox Jews
who gather in front of the Wailing Wall with men on one side and women on the
other partake in a spiritual experience that derives from the company of
others. Group solidarity can come from sharing a common purpose—such as that of
survival. However, it can also derive from a kind of aspiration in which the
self is suppressed in order to allow for unification with the cosmos or God. The infant’s experience of what Freud
termed the
oceanic feeling might be an early footprint for such strivings. Jung
talked about the
collective unconscious. Joyous and ecstatic praying is what
occurs at the Wailing Wall on Shabbos and for a moment even the casual
observer might forget his or her self.
So deftly described that I can see it in my mind's eye (and hear it with my mind's ear). I love the superimposition of the unity of prayer, over the many different names of god that are invoked. Beautiful idea.
ReplyDelete