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Presentation
The Editors
The ancient world had a cyclic view of life - history was ever repeating itself. Then came God's revelation as recorded in the Bible and, in the Jewish-Christian tradition, this world-view changed radically. For his people, God has taken this unending circle and turned it into a line, a path, with a point of departure and a destination. The whole of life is now a pilgrimage with the people of God ever moving forward to its final goal, the heavenly Jerusalem, Yerushalayim shel ma'alah.
This issue on pilgrimage has been prepared with this perspective in mind. Comparative ease in travel has made it possible for people to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to Israel, numbers never before deemed possible. A multiple of choices is available since so many groups are organized with various aims. There are those whose main objective is to visit the Holy Places and pray there, others are interested in ecumenical and interfaith contacts, still others are biblically, theologically or archeologically oriented. Unless people are well-prepared, though, they run the risk of returning disappointed from what should be a unique faith experience. They may find themselves subject to tourist exploitation, for instance, or else embroiled in political arguments so heavily weighted on one side or the other that an impartial attempt to try and understand the rights and wrongs of both sides becomes impossible.
For what, in fact, is a pilgrimage? It is an acknowledgement that this journey about to be undertaken is a microcosm of life's pilgrimage with the Bible as map. It means setting out in the spirit of Abraham to go where God is leading; it means living the Exodus experience of the journey from bondage to the liberty of the children of God. To go on a pilgrimage, though, is much more than a journey into the past. It is rather a making present, a living experience of God acting in our lives today. Just as truly as he acted in the lives of the patriarchs so too he is speaking to us now, not only through our contact with the places where past events took place, but through the life that is being lived in that same land today. In Jewish terms, the whole of the people's history is encapsulated in this generation; in Christian terminology, the mystery of the Incarnation of Christ is being lived today.
As believers we do not walk this land alone. The holy city of Jerusalem, which is its focal point, is sacred to the three monotheistic faiths, but for different reasons. For the Jew, Jerusalem is, in the words of Professor Zwi Werblowsky, a city that as such "is holy and has, for at least two and a half millenia, served as the symbol of the historic existence of a people hunted, humiliated, massacred, but never despairing of the promise of its ultimate restoration."(1)
For Christians, Jerusalem is the city of the paschal mystery of Jesus, the city towards which he tended all during his public life:
"Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem..:"
(Luke 18:31)
It is the city of his death-resurrection mystery, and the city from which Christianity spread out to the whole world:
"You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth."
(Acts 1:8)
Jerusalem is sacred also to Islam. Next to Mecca and Medina, the Dome of the Rock is the third most holy place of pilgrimage, connected as it is in Moslem tradition with Muhammed's ascent into heaven. It is interesting that this very spot is dear to all three of the monotheistic faiths, tradition associating the Rock with Abraham, the father in faith of Jew, Christian and Moslem alike. This fact alone should cause us to redouble our prayer that peace may soon come to Jerusalem.
It is our hope that this issue may serve all of our readers equally - those who will be going on pilgrimage, those who have been already, and also those who will never go. For all three categories, the essential is that a pilgrimage to Israel can only have lasting value if it is seen within the context and as symbol of our whole pilgrimage through life to God.
The Editor
(1) The Meaning of Jerusalem to Jews, Christians and Muslims Israel University Study Group for Middle Eastern Affairs, Jerusalem 1978.
