The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (50 page)

BOOK: The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories

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As the flames licked around the building, Titus observed that the Jews themselves did nothing to put out the fire, and he knew the battle was over. He walked into the temple, past the seven-branched candelabrum on the south side and the bread of sacrifice on the north, and up to the golden chains that veiled the Holy of Holies, the dwelling place of the Shekinah. He wanted to see the thing that the Jews were prepared to die for, the thing they would rather destroy than surrender. He wanted to see if all the stories about the Holy of Holies were true. They were. There was absolutely nothing there.

A
FTER HE HAD
defeated the rebels, Titus had the Jews rounded up and locked into the ruins of their temple, where eleven thousand of them died as they waited to hear their fate. Some starved to death; some were slain by the soldiers. Others, who were strong, were taken to the mines in Egypt; but the tallest and most beautiful were taken to Rome for the triumph. You can still see them there: they are carved on the Arch of Titus in the ruins of the Forum, bearing the sevenbranched candelabrum of the Temple of God up to the temple of Jupiter the Greatest and Best.

The Jews who survived were exiled and scattered across the face of the earth. Their temple had been cast down; but every year on Passover, wherever they were, as they celebrated their ancient liberation from slavery in Egypt, they turned to one another and said, “Next year in Jerusalem.” They still do.

And they have for centuries, for the Israelites have long been in exile, and they have long yearned for Zion. Abraham, the father of them all, had left the city of Ur with its mighty ziggurat and followed the calling of the Lord into the land of Canaan. Having left his ancestral temple behind, he offered his only son Isaac in sacrifice to the Lord on an empty mountaintop. When his grandson Jacob wandered out into the wilderness, he laid himself down to sleep on the same empty rock, and he witnessed the angels climbing a ladder from earth to heaven. The Temple Mount has been a sacred place to the Jews, they say, from time immemorial.

But while they have nursed affection for this place, the Jews have also long rejected any notion of a material god of stone or wood or gold who might demand a physical home. When the sons of Jacob were in exile in Egypt, they were forced to build the idolatrous temples of the Egyptians, and they longed to return to the empty mountain where their ancestors had communed with the divine. They went out from Egypt, just as Abraham their forefather had left the idolatrous ziggurat of Ur behind him; and they worshipped an immortal and invisible being, who told them:

I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in Heaven above, or that is in the Earth beneath, or that is in the water under the Earth.

Their God led them out into the desert, and to transport the laws he gave them, the Israelites made a portable ark, carried on two poles and hung with the dyed pelts of rams and badgers. At night they would erect a tent over this ark, and the Shekinah would rest there until morning, when she would lead them again out into the wilderness in the form of a pillar of fire and cloud.

Eventually, after many trials, the Israelites returned to the empty mountain where Abraham had offered his sacrifice and Jacob had seen the angels climb between earth and heaven. King David danced before
the ark as it was carried up to its final resting place. His son Solomon prepared to build a temple to house it, sending to Lebanon for cedar to build the roof and to Sheba for spices to burn upon the altar of the Lord.

But the Lord, who had roamed the empty desert as a pillar of cloud and flame, and who had forbidden his people to make an image of him, was somewhat ambivalent about Solomon’s temple. He spoke to the king, saying, “Concerning this house which thou art in building, if thou wilt walk in my statutes, and execute my judgements, and keep all my commandments to walk in them; then will I perform my word with thee, which I spake unto David thy father: and I will dwell among the children of Israel, and will not forsake my people Israel.”

It was only a conditional promise—more of a warning, perhaps—but Solomon went ahead and built his temple. His successors filled it with splendors so copious that prophet after prophet warned them against their vanity, reminding them that the Lord did not want their hecatombs and their vain ceremonies.

When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts?

Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies . . .

Four centuries after Solomon had built it, the temple was sacked and the Israelites were sent into exile in Babylon. There they sat down and wept for what they had left behind, saying: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.” And when they returned from exile, they rebuilt the Temple of God.

It was a poor affair built amid the ruins of lost Jerusalem, and so it was refurbished under King Herod the Great, who made it larger and more magnificent than it had ever been in the time of Solomon. The Jews were so concerned that the sacrifices and rituals of the temple would not be interrupted during the construction that Herod had to assemble all the building materials on the spot before work began,
to reassure his people that the building would be completed as he planned. Not a single day of worship was missed during the century it took to renovate the temple, and the Jews proudly said to one another, “He who has not seen the Temple of Jerusalem has never seen a beautiful building.”

It was a moment of hubris. Titus destroyed Herod’s temple within a few years of its completion. After it had been destroyed, the Israelites said to one another that God must have forsaken them because they had not walked in his statutes and executed his judgments. God had been a pillar of fire and cloud that swirled in the empty desert, and he had forbidden his people to imprison him in a form of any kind. The Israelites had built him a home, a vessel for the formless Shekinah, but they had ended up worshipping the temple they had made rather than the divinity it contained. The Temple of the Jews had begun as a building, but it had become an idol.

G
O TO THE
Western Wall any Friday evening, look lost, and you may be invited back to someone’s house for the Sabbath meal. At precisely eighteen minutes before sundown, two candles are placed on the dining table and lit. The father of the house blesses his family, and then everyone takes a glass of wine, which is also blessed; and then the family wash their hands. The father blesses the two loaves of plaited bread that have been laid upon the table, and then everyone sits down to eat the Sabbath meal.

It is a simple ritual, but it’s an ancient one, which has been handed down, Sabbath after Sabbath, from the rituals of the temple. In fact, it is the temple itself, whose vanished walls are reconstructed in the laying of the table with candles, bread, and wine. Rabbi Isaac de Luria wrote a poem about it in the sixteenth century.

To southward I set

the mystical candelabrum,

I make room in the north

for the table with the loaves.

. . .

Let the Shekinah be surrounded

by six Sabbath loaves

connected on every side

with the Heavenly Sanctuary.

The Shekinah appears every Sabbath eve and then flits away until she reappears the next week, as ephemeral as snow. The boundary of the temple that was built to house her, on the other hand, has become an architectural idol, the idolatry of which has led to its own ruin. The ownership and the archaeology of the Wailing Wall, the Kotel, the Al-Buraq Wall—call it what you will—has become an insoluble problem, whose fixed terms of offense and revenge are as hard and as heavy a burden as stone.

That is to take the short-term view of the dreaming architect, to whom buildings appear fixed and permanent. Over time, the wall, like all of the buildings whose secret lives have been recounted in this book, has been ruined by barbarians, appropriated by different faiths, and copied by the faithful. Its story has been retold in Hebrew and Latin, Arabic and English. It has been excavated and restored in prophecies and has become a tourist spectacle. It has been evolving for centuries, and in all likelihood it always will be.

All of this has taken place in the blinking of an eye. Like all architecture, the Western Wall is nothing more than a miraculous blizzard that will have turned to rain by morning.

Notes

I
NTRODUCTION
: T
HE
A
RCHITECT’S
D
REAM

page

4
“
The cloud-capp’d towers
”: Shakespeare,
The Tempest
, act 4, scene 1.

5
“
an assemblage of structures”:
William Cullen Bryant,
Funeral Oration Occasioned by the Death of Thomas Cole, Delivered before the National Academy of Design, New York, May 4, 1848
,
http://books.google.com/books?id=OL4UAAAAYAAJ
.

6
“
the problem of fixing standards
”: Le Corbusier,
Vers un Architecture
, trans. Frederick Etchells (Academy Editions, 1987), p. 133 (first published 1923).