In Search of a Spiritual Home

Lawrence A. Hoffman

From Reform Judaism, Fall 1994
Reprinted with permission.

Picture a map of North America: a web of crisscrossed lines called interstate highways, perhaps. Or is it the natural network of lakes and rivers that feed our cities and townships? Maps are simply lines joining dots, but whether the dots are points on a weather front, cities with a crack problem, or elevations over 2000 feet depends on the mapmaker. And we are all mapmakers who carry around inside our heads a virtual atlas that we consult with regularity as we make our way through the spaces of our lives.

Among the world's maps is a map of the sacred. Some sites seem inherently sacred --- like the burning bush where Moses stopped, not in scientific detachment (just to marvel at a natural phenomenon) but because he was drawn to its sacred ambiance. Or think of Jacob, awakened from his desert sleep by a dream of angels traversing a ladder joining heaven to earth. ``Surely God is in this place,'' he concluded, ``And I did not know it.'' These places are holy because God already dwells there.

Then there are natural miracles like the Grand Canyon or the redwood forests, which modern Jews might call holy, not because they think that God is literally present there, but because such places testify to God's creative splendor.

Other places, finally, are historically sacred. Would we care about Masada if zealots hadn't did there? But they did, so we make pilgrimage to that site. For years, the Israeli Defense Forces marched recruits up to Masada to internalize the message of ``Never again!''

Our sacred history thus makes ordinary sites sacred by the residue of memory. Pass a place where miracles one happened and Jewish tradition demands a benediction; this is, after all, where Elijah defeated the prophets of Baal or where Judah Maccabee defeated Antiochus; so we who pass by take sacred stock: ``Blessed is God who wrought miracles for our ancestors in those days.'' More modern times give us Auschwitz, where God certainly was not, but where we bridle at the thought that it might be desanctified by governmental edict. Some twenty years ago, a German travel poster advertised tourist junkets to ``the rolling hills of Dachau.'' Rolling hills indeed! Who can resist a prayer standing within the once-upon-a-time teeming Jewish ghettos of Venice, Prague, and Krakow, or just outside the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam --- surely a site as historically sacred as Mt. Carmel where Elijah prevailed?

• Markers
• Sacred Art and Dedications
• Sacred Space and Sacred Stories: A Modern Pilgrimage
• The Sacred Pilgrimage of Life
• The Synagogue as Sacred Center
• About this document ...