May 14, 2009
What makes places sacred? “Sacred” is not as easily recognized as, say, “happy,” or “dangerous.” When cartoon characters chance upon sun-drenched streams that bubble with promise or darkened caves that fairly reek of monster habitation, we know exactly what these are.
The sacred is not so easily pictured. Even Jacob didn’t appreciate the presence of God when he stumbled upon it. It took a dream of angels connecting heaven and earth for him to name his place “Beth El” (“house of God”); “Surely God is in this place,” he confesses, “and I did not know it.”
How, then, do we, who are less practiced than Jacob in the art of the holy, know the sacred when we come across it? Unlike “happy” and “dangerous,” “sacred” sometimes comes in camouflage.
Not always, however. There are natural sites of grandeur that inspire enough awe to evoke psalms of praise. Standing on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, psychologist C.G. Jung reports a “higher state of consciousness.” Albert Einstein found the sacred in the “harmony of the universe,” because it imbued him “with the consciousness of the insufficiency of the human mind to understand it.” Judaism greets these inherently sacred places with blessings. We stop before them and say, “Blessed is God…for the work of creation.”
When people question the holiness of the Grand Canyon or the Milky Way, I suspect that we are simply using words in different ways. They consider them just part of nature. I do not question their naturalness, but calling them sacred ups the ante; it adds a dimension of the ineffable.
Other places are sacred not inherently but by association with something that once happened there. These too evoke blessings in our tradition. Upon visiting Haifa’s Mount Carmel, the site where Elijah defeated the prophets of Ba’al, we say, “Blessed is God who wrought miracles for our ancestors in those days.” Unlike the inherently sacred, historically sacred places do come camouflaged; they may be nothing more than decrepit dumps. That’s why we carry guide books with us and why tourist signs adorn the ordinary remains of unordinary occurrences.
Historically sacred sites too occasion disagreement. “There are no miracles,” the skeptic says. But the modern-day religionist need not claim the supernatural in order to invoke the category of miracle; newborn babies are nothing if not natural — but we may think of them as miracles. However Elijah managed to make his point, his duel with idolatry may still rank as miraculous. It all depends on viewpoint, Martin Buber taught us. Take the splitting of the Red Sea. Suppose it was caused by a favorable wind or low tide. Or suppose it didn’t even split. What matters is that, whatever actually happened, the Israelites saw it as a miracle and ever after invited us to see it that way.
We can hardly live each day at the Grand Canyon or Mount Carmel, however, so Judaism acknowledges a third category of the sacred: places that are holy just because we say they are. Like historically sacred sites, these too require human markers, but these markers do not just indicate some holiness already there; they create the holy to begin with. Inherently and historically sacred places are sacred whether we recognize it or not. Here, the sacred is conferred by us and us alone.
That is why our sedra this week instructs us, “Venerate my sanctuary.” The most obvious meaning of “sanctuary” is the Temple, but Sforno extends the meaning to “the sacred places after the Temple’s destruction, like synagogues and places of Torah study.” We should include our homes as well. We do not just say blessings over such places; we put up mezuzot, the announcement that we ourselves have summoned God to lend a presence here.
Human beings are the only species that appreciate the sacred. We alone can recognize the holiness inherent in nature and bestowed by history. But what is extraordinarily stunning is our capacity to create holiness where none existed before. Some places are holy just because we say they are. We act Godly in them. And we mark them appropriately.
Creation out of nothing is the highest form of artistry. Tradition imputes it to God — it is how God created the universe. The law of Conservation of Energy acknowledges that nothing comparable has happened since.
But there is a different form of creativity that is comparable: the artist’s gift of shaping something definitive out of undifferentiated color, movement, sound, or space. The sacred is such a form of art, and we are all the artists of it.
Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, cofounder of Synagogue 3000, is the Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York. He is the coeditor, with David Arnow, of My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Jewish Lights).
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