the cable car to the western wall David Cassuto
School of Architecture Ariel University of Israel
The Jewish people are commanded to make a pilgrimage to God’s earthly seat three times a year, marking the festivals of Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot (Exod. 23:17–18 and 34:23–24; Deut. 16:16.) When they received this commandment the Temple had not yet been built, so the phrase employed was “in the place He chooses.” (Ibid. and elsewhere in Deuteronomy) The dates of the three pilgrimage festivals coincide with specific markers on the agricultural calendar of the Levant: Passover is also the ‘spring festival’; Shavuot is the ‘festival of the first fruits’; and Sukkot is the ‘harvest festival.’ But the Torah also assigns transcendental meaning to these holidays, thereby distinguishing the Jewish faith from most of other religions. Passover commemorates the transition from slavery to freedom; Shavuot celebrates the giving of the Torah; and Sukkot honors God’s beneficence in providing shelter to His people wherever they are. Natural events thus become part of the yearly cycle of divine events, carrying both physical significance and abstract religious importance. The calendar is transformed from a sequence of seasons linked to nature into a sequence of festivals that link the creation to the Creator, and nature to the One who empowers nature. (Heschel, 1951) From the moment that God’s presence was focused in a particular place, the Jewish people were obligated to appear there as well. At first He ‘resided’ in the Tabernacle that moved from place to place in the wilderness—a deity always on the move. The abstract god is a revolutionary concept, not only in those bygone days but also in much later periods. But the people, who had been exposed to impressive temples of stone and marble dedicated to other gods, could no longer accept such an abstraction. So in the tenth century BCE King Solomon constructed a permanent sanctuary for God—the Temple erected on Mt. Moriah, which came to be known as the Temple Mount. It is true that in the prayer he offered at its consecration (1 Kings 8:12–61.) Solomon sought to attach an abstract sense to the place from which human prayers would rise to the abstract God; in practice, though, it was a material sanctuary in every respect.
