Remarkably for a species that lived successfully as nomads for so many thousands of years, humans have a strong propensity for designating areas of sacred ground, from St. Peter's in Rome to the bleachers at Fenway Park. These spots can seem very ordinary (the Heart of Midlothian, celebrated by Walter Scott, is now merely one gum-encrusted cobblestone among many others) but, once designated, become the focus of powerful emotions and rituals (all true Scots, passing that cobblestone, must spit on it).
Evolutionary psychologists would argue that the sense of sacred ground is a necessary corollary to our nomadic past, when our lives depended on a just appreciation of the Place of Good Berries, even in the off-season. Dispassionate valuation has never been our style, though. We prefer to swing between indifference and reverence, so most hunter-gatherers' mental maps cover, not just the physical landscape, but the boundaries of powerful spiritual dominions. Paleontologists would go further, pointing out that the reservation of particular spots for certain behavior (defecation, for instance) is something we share with the lizards - which may explain why the profanation of sacred places calls up such basic reptilian responses as fear and aggression.
This day in AD 70, the Roman Army finally reconquered Jerusalem from its determined Jewish defenders. Titus, son of the Emperor, set about reducing the whole place to ground level, leaving only three isolated towers so that later visitors could know how mighty a city had yielded to him. And indeed it was mighty: King Herod, a well-travelled man, had turned Jerusalem into the Dubai of his time, a new-built gleaming capital to impress the increasingly numerous Graeco-Roman tourists. All was now humbled: Herod's palace, the quarter of the Saducees - and the Temple, seat of the living presence, tabernacle of the almighty, cast down and dispersed so that no man might say where it had stood.
That is now the problem, because an indeterminate sacred spot leaves itself open to the interpretations of self-interest. The whole of what had been Herod's Temple Mount is now under the control of a Muslim foundation responsible for the upkeep of two places sacred to Islam: the Dome of the Rock, scene of Abraham's sacrifice, and Al-Aqsa mosque, furthermost terminus of the Prophet's mystical night ride to the seventh heaven. Opinion has been divided as to which of these occupies the site of the Temple, but the assumption on all sides has been that any reconstruction of Judaism's most holy place, whose loss has been mourned for nearly two thousand years, would involve desecration of Islam's third-most important sites. Since 1967, Jews and Muslims have fenced around this issue, seeking for openings and watchful for provocations.
This may be unnecessary: an ingenious body of recent archaeological work by a Tel-Aviv architect, Tugia Sagiv, using the eyewitness observations of the fall of Jerusalem, knowledge of priestly practice, and non-intrusive ground scanning, places the Temple site on an open section of the mount, aligned with the Western (ex-Wailing) Wall. The Dome of the Rock occupies the position of a late temple to Jupiter, itself overlying a pagan tower to Astarte. Al-Aqsa covers a storeroom for vestments and a general gathering place, the Court of the Gentiles, that was open to all (even moneychangers). For once in the Middle East, history seems to offer a way out of an intractable problem.
Will anyone take it? Of course not; for more than half the point of a sacred spot is keeping others out of it. And if any Christians among you are shaking your heads at the petty intolerance of this, be reminded of the current state of Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where a ladder put out for necessary repairs sometime before 1852 has stayed there (the repairs still undone) because each group of monks refuses to let the others out onto that particular ledge. The last major fistfight among the Christians was this November at the Feast of the Holy Cross; things have been so bad for so long that the church's hereditary caretakers are Muslim. Though we take off our hats or our shoes, we still bring our bad habits into the place of worship.
If you enjoy these moments of human fallibility, you will find a new one every day at my sister site, http://bozosapiens.blogspot.com. See you there.
