Celebrating Jerusalem’s sacredness

A multidisciplinary festival attempts to answer the question of whether a city based on diverse spiritual and religious values can create a civil society in which these differences are set aside.

By MORDECHAI BECK
Mekudeshet festival goers participate in a meeting called ‘A Shared House of Prayer for All Believers’ (photo credit: GALI TIBBON)
Mekudeshet festival goers participate in a meeting called ‘A Shared House of Prayer for All Believers’
(photo credit: GALI TIBBON)
JERUSALEM IS much bigger than its physical boundaries.
Because of its unique and peculiar history, it has gained an unparalleled prominence among the great cities of the world ‒ according to some historians, it has been fought over at least 34 times.
Yet, Jerusalem, even in its present, much expanded version (four times as large as in the Second Temple period) plays host to fewer than a million citizens ‒ a small number, indeed, for a grand, contemporary metropolis.
The city is not, however, famous for its size, but rather for the meaning that countless generations have bestowed upon it. In the Jewish tradition, it is known as the Holy City. This nomenclature was adopted by Christians and then by Muslims who renamed it al-Quds – Arabic for holy. For all of these monotheistic believers, Jerusalem is the place that evokes feelings of a higher consciousness, of a connection to a spiritual reality.
As the late Dominican monk, Prof. Marcel Dubois, put it, “Jerusalem is the only place that we are sure God touched.” In a word, the city is sacred to vast numbers beyond its inhabitants.
A few years ago, some Jerusalem “artists and dreamers” (their definition) came together to create a festival that would celebrate this sacredness.
For the past five years, they have presented their version of what it means to live together in the city. They realized immediately that they were dealing with a massive paradox – the city that draws so many diverse people to its gates is also one that invites divisiveness, exclusion and hatred.
“We thought we could create an awareness of the pluralistic nature of the city. As the prophet Isaiah wrote some 2,500 years ago, the city would be ‘a house of prayer for all peoples,’” says Karen Brunwasser, one of the organizers of this year’s festival, which was held in September.
Initially the emphasis was on music, including international singers and groups who were drawn to Jerusalem precisely because of its reputation as a spiritual capital. But in the past year or two, and especially this past year, the organizers felt compelled to give some added dimensions to the festival, emphasizing the deeper message that the name “Jerusalem” evokes. This included a series of meetings called the “Seven Ways to Dissolve Boundaries,” “Out of Zion,” “Amen,” “Recalibrating,” “Confessions,” “A Matter of Life and Death” and “Rustling.”
These events were meant to bring participants a sense of what the city can be.
To really understand if the festival worked as the organizers intended, it would probably have meant participating in all, or at least most, of the events. Some events were covered by The Jerusalem Report, others can be commented on only through hearsay.
FOR EXAMPLE, “Out of Zion” was a way of getting to know the center of the city. As Brunwasser explains to The Report, “The second intifada literally killed the center of the city. It took a long time to retool itself to be attractive for locals, as well as for tourists. In the last few years, the light rail has been built, the Mahane Yehuda market has been refurbished with all sorts of new stores, cafés, a nightlife with music and poetry and so forth. Zion Square, which witnessed the memorial for the murder of Shira Banki, who took part in a gay parade in nearby Keren Hayesod Street, led paradoxically to a series of dialogues between different sectors of the city. Orthodox rabbis Benny Lau and Dov Menachem came to speak in an attempt to reframe the square as a place of dialogue, rather than one of trauma.
“We wanted to further this process during the festival, by bringing something green and soft instead of something rancorous and angry. So, we had this idea of making a temporary forest in Zion Square by bringing trees and planting them in the square. The trees are too heavy for one person to carry, so it requires a number of people to lift them and bring them to the square together.”
This project worked on a number of levels because it brought Jerusalemites together, even if the goal – creating a forest – was only temporary.
On the other hand, the radio show “A Matter of Life and Death” was more problematic.
The radio/theatrical broadcast took the audience through a number of real life-and-death stories. This included a narrative by a member of Israel’s Druse community, which holds the transmigration of souls as a fundamental belief.
But whether this helped illuminate the issues of Jerusalem is difficult to know.
A similar doubt was raised by “Confessions,” in which circles of Jerusalemites read out confessions from a variety of sources – mainly personal – and reacted to them, or didn’t. Again, although it might have had meaning for the immediate participants, it was difficult to understand where it was taking people. While it was interesting and often amusing to the Hebrew-speaking participants, it was difficult to see how it would impact the city’s diverse citizenry.
A more obvious and successful event took place in the Hinnom Valley, located in the city’s center. This was the biblical site where the kings of Judah sacrificed their children by fire and from which the Hebrew word for hell (gei hinnom) is derived.
The verdant park became the scene for what is all too infrequent: interfaith meetings.
I joined a group of Christians, Jews and Muslims in learning and singing hymns. Our session was led by a young Catholic trainee priest with his guitar who guided us, in perfect Hebrew, through Psalm-based hymns.
Then, inside the adjacent Alpert Youth Music Center, hundreds of people shared their music and stories in a convivial atmosphere. Among those participating was a choir of Copts. Its members were living in the Old City, but had rarely ventured beyond their abodes before this meeting. Rabbis, Muslims, priests, nuns and curious citizens made up the rest of the motley audience in an outpouring of song and speech that expressed a profound sense of spiritual unity.
One of the Coptic priests said, “This is truly fantastic; I’ve never been in an encounter like this before.”
In this, the event reflected the inner essence of the festival in a way that previous events had not.
The “Seven Ways to Dissolve Boundaries” was, theoretically, a positive way of discovering unusual people who are making efforts to unify the city. We met the Arabic-Christian head of the Islamic Museum of Art, Nadim Sheiban, who explained the origins of the Museum and the way it has brought Arabic culture into the heart of the city.
“I never knew that there was such extraordinary art here,” said one participant while viewing the current display of protest posters from Iran.
We were then taken to the other side of the city, to Ir Ganim, where, among the housing estates, the local citizens, alongside professional archeologists, were helping to uncover some peculiar rock formations called regamim (literally, a pile of stones), which archeologists have dated from the 7th and 8th centuries BCE.
One theory is that they are memorials to places where the ancient Israelites had set up altars outside the Temple, a practice condemned by those priests and prophets who wanted sacrifices to be the unique province of the Temple.
Many of these piles are found in western and southern Jerusalem. In order to use them as a means of bringing people together, the archeologists organized neighborhoods to participate in ordering the sites so it felt like “theirs.” It was an important lesson to show how something so ancient could be used to bring people together today.
By contrast, we were then taken to the experimental school in Beit Hanina, in the heart of Arab East Jerusalem, where we were to meet the principal, Amal Ayub. We were told that the secondary school, which now has more than 600 pupils and has attracted both Christians and Muslims, is the first to offer an Israeli syllabus for high school matriculation. Ayub, who is not an educator by profession, seeks to provide Arab pupils with equal opportunities to fit into the Israeli employment system. Unfortunately, although we waited in high anticipation for Ayub’s appearance, she phoned to tell us that she had been held up at an army roadblock and would be unable to meet with us. This was a prime example of reality intruding on the idealism of the festival, and, in fact, was the opposite of what the “artists and dreamers” had planned.
Then there was the music. This was without a doubt the most memorable and successful part of the three-week festival. Among the notable musical duos were Sona Jobarteh and Ravid Kahalani, from The Gambia and Israel, respectively.
SONA JOBARTEH is the first Gambian woman to play the kora – the 21-stringed African harp ‒ usually played exclusively by men. She has added to that distinction by singing and composing her own music. Kahalani leads a local band, Yemen Blues, and, on the face of it, the two musicians and their bands should not have found a common language. But they gelled magnificently, with Jobarteh’s lilting voice and kora-playing beautifully complemented by Kahalani’s wilder forays into world music styles.
Another well-integrated performance was given by Zohar Fresco, a master of the frame drum (known more popularly in Israel as tof Miriam). Fresco had invited friends from abroad, all of whom played some sort of frame drum, and each was obviously a consummate musician. The range was wide – from flute and drum from India, to a small hand drum from Uzbekistan, to guitar and drum from Spain. It was a musical equivalent of a “house of prayer for all peoples.”
These two performances took place, perhaps symbolically, in the newly renovated YMCA building, itself a monument to the integration of differing faiths.
A more raucous performance took place in the David’s Tower Museum, whose massive structure hosted, among others, Baaba Maal, a musician from Senegal who came onto the stage wearing what appeared to be high-priest robes. He was particularly successful in having the audience join in with him, a big man who pranced around the stage and sang like a combination of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and Mick Jagger.
The David’s Tower Museum also provided the backdrop for the final concert, which took place early on a Friday afternoon. There were a number of performers, but the one most attuned to the festival’s theme was the Qawwali ensemble led by Yaron Pe’er who combined his Sufi-inspired devotional music with the Flamenco-driven singing and dancing of Shuki Shawicki. It was a perfect way to prepare for the oncoming Shabbat.
Did the festival live up to its high expectations? On balance, yes, insofar as it brought a disparate crowd of individuals together in ways not ventured beforehand. The ideals of the Mekudeshet festival were realized in many ways, especially in the music.
As Brunwasser explains, “There is a great diversity in the city that cannot be contained by one group or another. No one can have hegemony over Jerusalem. What the festivities revealed, indeed, was the emergence of all sorts of coalitions that express this diversity.
“So, for example, religious women created a program for secular women, haredim are saying they want ‘in,’ and Palestinians want to be counted as an integral part of the city.”
The organizers asked each of the separate groups one question – “Are you in favor of an open Jerusalem?” The answers could be found in the multifaceted events that showed that more and more groups are prepared to think out of the box.
“We’re trying to show that diverse groups can live together,” said Brunwasser.
There remains, however, a lingering doubt about the secularization of the sacredness that is at the heart of the three weeks of festivities. Can a city based on diverse spiritual and religious values create a civil society in which these differences are set aside? It is a massive challenge, and Mekudeshet is to be applauded for starting the multilayered dialogue.


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