Mountain of Holiness

Whether the capital of Ukraine should be called Kiev or Kyiv
is more immediate and maybe just as murky
as whether “Turkikiye” should be the name of Turkey;
or whether Bangkok, Thailand’s royal capital, should now receive

parentheses, preceded by the longest capital that’s in the Guinness
Book of Records — are dilemmas that I think far less
important than the name to give a very holy mess
that in Jerusalem now troubles pious people more than it does sinners.

Its most ancient name appears in Genesis and is Moriah,
the place where God told Abraham to save his son,
His ostensible command-to-kill undone;
no holiness than saving human lives is higher.

Ralbag, a great rabbi, claims that God’s original, unclear intention
was just that Abraham show Isaac how to offer
a sacrifice—of sacrifices a great scoffer
when they involve a victim of the tribe to which we all belong, called “Menschen.”

It’s where the Jewish Temple used to be, though many Muslims may deny it,
and a mosque and an Islamic Dome stand too.
Exactly what the mountain should be called I do
believe is not Al Aqsa, as most Muslims claim, but Har HaBayit,

“The Mountain of the House,” the Temple Solomon constructed after David
paid for the precious land. Destroyed
by Babylon, its memory has been enjoyed
for ages since the House of Holiness was not forever lost, and we must save it.

In “(Bangkok): A Push for Parentheses Miffs Thais (Who Have Bigger Problems),” NYT, 4/2/22, Hannah Beech writes about a debate in Thailand over whether the capital should be known internationally as “Bangkok,” after the old riverside settlement where she lives, or “Krung Thep Maha Nakhon.”

Meir Soloveichik suggests, in Episode #230 of his Bible 365 series, “The Search for the Temple: Text: Psalms 131-32,” that the reason Deuteronomy does not identify Jerusalem as the site of the central shrine that Moses instructs the Israelites to build, is that it wishes the site to be discovered by a process of seeking. He quotes Rabbi Joseph Soloveichik, ‘the Rov’, who said that knowledge of God must be “ecstatic and perceptional,” discovered not just by our sense of sight and sound, but by our sense of the sacred. The Rov points out that Deuteronomy does not identify Jerusalem as the site of God’s central shrine and that this echoes God who does not tell Abraham In Gen. 12:1 to go to the land of Canaan. Instead, He tells him to go אֶל-הָאָרֶץ, אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ, “to the land that I will show you.”